Nana’s up watching QVC. The sound is off, and the diamond solitaire that fills the screen gets rotated by disembodied female fingers so it reflects the spotlights over and over. When I got stationed in the Doverton field office, she came with me from Flint “to take care of Cassie.” It was the only way to get her to join me here, but it’s pretty clear to me who’s taking care of who in the Doverton suburbs.

“Hi, Nana,” I say, hanging up my coat. “Were Fredo and Carol over?”

“Just left.” She points at the screen. “I bought you that ring. It’s perfect until you find a man to marry you.”

I’m not insulted by her anymore. She’s my nana. She can say whatever she wants about me. The purchase of a four-thousand-dollar ring would be a concern if her payment method was more than a Fisher-Price version of a credit card with a twenty-dollar spending limit. I set it up specifically for daily QVC emergencies. They take her orders over the phone and it declines the next day when she either regrets the purchase or forgets about it. I have the sneaking suspicion she knows the card won’t go through but plays along to please me.

“Thanks. I’m not looking for a man, but I like diamonds.”

I sit next to Nana. She’s four-foot ten. Seventy-three and counting. My mother’s mother. In front of us is a one-third-complete thousand-piece puzzle of the White House in spring. The outside edge is placed just fine, but the “completed” parts of the inside look like a shingled roof after a storm. Pieces are jammed in sideways or forced together. Some pieces have their blanks choked by ill-fitting tabs, or little slivers of open space between pieces when the tab is too small.

“I don’t think these two go together,” I say as if the problem is with two pieces and not with eighty percent of her decisions.

“The perfect’s the enemy of the good.” She says it as if it’s the first time she’s dropped this nugget of wisdom on me. It isn’t. “You smell like a man.”

I’m about to smell under my arm to see what she’s talking about but stop myself when her meaning clicks into place. “I do not.”

“English Leather. Had a boy like that once. We drove to Woodstock together in his Buick Skylark. Ran all 350 horses into the ground. Big backseat too.”

Nana’s from Detroit. She knows her cars and she knows her backseats. She knows what a man smells like, and she’ll call me Agent-Pants-On-Fire for a week unless I come clean immediately.

“If I smell like English Leather, then you smell the guy I was talking to at the bar.”

“Knew it.”

I gently take more of the puzzle apart. Nana puts on her glasses. She doesn’t like wearing them even though she’s so farsighted she can’t see an inch or three feet in front of her face.

She leans into the puzzle. “You’re making a mess out of this, Cassandra.” She joins me in taking apart the jammed-together pieces.

“Sorry. I’m not good at puzzles.” I say it with the same tone I used to convince her I needed her to come to Doverton with me.

“I’ll say. Tell me about English Leather. Should I return the ring?”

She never wore a ring on her left hand that she didn’t buy herself, and no man ever wore a match to hers. I’m from a long line of single women. I figure I’ll be single my whole life too. I’ve stopped calling it the Grinstead curse. Now I call it the Grinstead blessing.

“I’ll cancel the ring,” I say.

“So it’s serious?” She looks at me above the frames as if that helps her see. I’m not sure that it does.

“No. No, it’s not. It was just a conversation. I’m not interested in getting involved right now.”

“Not gonna get easier when you move us to Quantico, you know.” She snaps a piece into place. It lays flat. “Got the ring in a size six. That okay for you?”

“I don’t like square cut.”

“Carol noticed all the rich bitches at the club have square cut.”

“I’m neither rich, nor a member of the club.”

“Ha!” She slaps my knee with her paper-skinned hand when she realizes I didn’t deny being a bitch. “You’re too good for them, my girl.” She pats my cheek. “Every last one of them. Get their smell on you but don’t let them own you. Never trust them.”

“Darn right, Nana.” I put down the pieces I’ve pried apart. “Are you going to bed?”

“In a bit. I’m going to watch that guy.” She waves at the TV. “The one with the moustache who doesn’t wear a shirt.”

I stand. “I’m going then.” I kiss her cheek.

“I love you, Cassandra,” she says absently, looking over her puzzle.

“I love you too, Nana.”

---

I get through brushing my teeth and putting on pajamas. I even make it to bed, more or less. My butt is on the mattress but feet are still on the floor when I can smell him as clearly as my grandmother did. I feel him where his hands and lips touched me. I put my hand under my clothes and slip them inside my seam. I’m throbbing like a teenager. His words. His touch. The lies that revealed truths just as the game intended.

He could be a dark web madman, but maybe not. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re all wrong and he’s just a legitimate businessman.

That was one of his lies.

Four fingers deep, with the heel of my hand jerking the surface of my nub, I consider the possibility that he is a decent man. His integrity must be battered raw with insinuation. He’s beautiful, prideful, and falsely accused. He’s a good man doing good things.

He has a magnetism. It’s almost frightening, but I never—not for one second—felt fear. The danger of him sends me to new heights. The idea that I was walking some kind of edge at the bar sends shivers to the base of my spine.

I haven’t even drawn the duvet down and I’m on my hands and knees, rubbing myself in the dark, remembering the look he gave the driver behind me.

I come so hard I have to bite back a scream that might scare my grandmother.