The house was three hours north and had a name, which Nora thought was the single most ridiculous thing she had ever encountered.
"Greyhurst," Adrian said, not looking up from his laptop.
"It's a house. It doesn't need a name. Houses have numbers."
"Take it up with my great-grandfather."
"Is he available?"
"He's in the garden," Adrian said. "Permanently. Under the roses. He was very specific about it."
Nora laughed, and the sound startled them both. It had been — she counted, and then stopped counting — a while.
The road turned to gravel, then to something that was mostly an opinion about where a road should go. Pines closed over the car. Her phone lost signal in a single decisive drop, three bars to none, and she felt the loss physically, a hand letting go of her ankle.
Nobody could reach her here.
Nobody could reach her here.
"Stop the car," she said.
Adrian stopped the car.
She got out into cold that smelled like sap and wet stone, walked ten feet up the road, and stood with her arms wrapped around herself, breathing. Behind her, the engine ticked. He didn't follow her. He didn't ask. He just waited, and after a while she heard the driver's door and the crunch of gravel and he stopped a careful six feet away and said nothing at all.
"Four months," Nora said to the trees. "Four months of listening for car doors. Every time one went outside my building I stood behind the curtain to see who'd got out of it."
"Nobody gets out of anything here," Adrian said. "Nothing comes up that road. There's a deer who turns up on the lawn at about five, and she's extremely rude, and that is the entire list."
Nora wiped her face with the heel of her hand, briskly, the way you deal with something inconvenient.
"Clause nine," she said.
"What about it?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to say something practical so we could both pretend that didn't happen."
"Consider it pretended," said Adrian Cole, and went to get her bag.