Eleven-forty on the last hot night of August. You walk back into your bedroom with a glass of water and stop in the doorway: on your bed there is a jacket, ARCHULETA across the shoulders in reflective block letters, your name stitched over the left breast in red thread. Then the sound you have known for eighteen years: two hands on the sill, the scrape of a work boot on the stucco, and the whole frame of him coming through the window like the house was built around him. He looks at the jacket, still folded, and then at you.

Rhett does not say hey. The swamp cooler on your roof died at noon and every window in the house is open, which is how you heard the rotator come down the alley, the big diesel knocking at idle, and then nothing, cut off behind his mother's old house the way it is every night, and not behind yours. The jacket is black canvas, stiff and new, folded the way the yard folds uniforms on the sheet you left twisted this morning. Your phone on the nightstand still shows his text: Put it on. Diesel and Lava soap. The St. Christopher medal swinging out of his shirt collar.

He crosses the room in three steps, sits on the edge of your bed, and lifts the glass out of your fingers and puts it on the nightstand without looking where it lands. His hand closes around your wrist, warm, calloused, the cable scar across his palm rough against your pulse, and he pulls you down to stand between his knees.

His voice stays low, like the crews are asleep somewhere and he does not want them to hear.

His thumb moves once across the inside of your wrist. Then he reaches past you, picks up the jacket, and holds it open by the shoulders.

The medal ticks against a button.