I'd been ignoring the sold sign for two weeks.

That's the thing about Oleander Court — it's a cul-de-sac of six houses and a HOA newsletter that lands in your inbox every Thursday with the regularity of a bad conscience, so when the Hendersons at number sixteen decided to retire to Tucson and cash out, the whole neighborhood had opinions. I had zero opinions. I work from home. I have a pool. I am in the business of minding my own.

The Saturday the moving truck arrived, I was at my kitchen island with my second coffee, laptop open, looking at a brand deck for a client in Denver who had the aesthetic sensibility of someone who'd learned design from a dentist's waiting room. I was in an oversized linen shirt and nothing else, which is the full range of my work-from-home uniform, and I had exactly no plans to interact with the moving situation visible through my kitchen window.

The wrought-iron fence between my yard and number sixteen is decorative. Lovely, actually — the HOA insisted on it for the "open neighborhood" visual. What it means in practice is that whoever lives at sixteen and I have a direct sightline into each other's lives, which with the Hendersons had been fine because the Hendersons were seventy-two and went to bed at nine and mostly what I saw was Harold tending his bird feeders.

The new people were not Harold.

I watched from the kitchen as a moving crew worked in the June heat and a blonde woman in a perfect ponytail directed them with the authority of a general. She had a clipboard. An actual physical clipboard. She pointed at boxes with a precision that suggested each one had a designated GPS coordinate in her floor plan.

I almost went back to the Denver dentist's waiting room deck.

Then she turned her head.

The chin tilt did it. A specific way of tilting the chin at something she disapproved of — a mover, the angle of a piece of furniture — that I recognized the way you recognize a song from the first three notes. My stomach dropped about two inches.

Sienna Caldwell.

Except obviously not Caldwell anymore, because Sienna had been collecting upgrades since junior year and a new last name was the logical conclusion of the program.

I sat with my coffee and did the inventory. Thirteen years of it, compressed. The homecoming ballot where she'd won by six votes and I'd come in third, which was somehow worse than second because it meant I hadn't even been the runner-up. The AP English class where she'd gotten an A-minus and I'd gotten an A and she'd made a point of being gracious about it in a way that made me feel like I'd stolen something. The boy — I won't give him the dignity of a name — whose attention I'd wanted sophomore year and who had chosen Sienna the way boys always chose Sienna: reflexively, like gravity.

She moved through the moving situation the way she had always moved through everything. Like the world had been arranged for her passage.

I was already composing my internal monologue about this development — something along the lines of absolutely not, hard pass, I'll be moving my pool schedule to six a.m. — when the husband came around the back of the truck.

He was carrying a box. Head angled down. Dark blond hair, slightly long. A gray shirt with the sleeves pushed up.

I saw the hands first.

I know that sounds strange. I know it is strange. But those hands — the size of them, the particular way they wrapped around the box — hit me somewhere south of my sternum before my brain had finished processing the attached person.

He set the box down on the porch and looked up.

The desert sun was behind him. He shielded his eyes and looked across the fence — directly at my kitchen window, directly at me — with an expression that went through several phases in about three seconds. Polite-stranger. Recognition-flicker. Recognition.

And then the specific expression of a man who has just realized that the universe has a sense of humor and it is not currently operating in his favor.

My coffee cup was halfway to my mouth. I put it down.

His name had never been just Dex. I had not known that until this moment. His name was Dex Harmon, and he was standing on my new neighbor's porch doing the exact same math I was doing, and the math was coming out the same way for both of us.

I thought: well.

I thought: this is going to be a problem.