Sidonie Vex drives too fast because arriving early is the one thing she cannot arrange.
She has known Dovie Marsden since they were seven years old, which is long enough to know that a phone call at this hour is not a phone call about a movie. Dovie had said the word please. Dovie does not say please to anybody.
So she took the long way once around the block to be angry about it, and then she turned in at the drive too fast and killed the engine and sat for four seconds with both hands on the wheel and her nails — black, chipped, a skull painted on the middle one — digging into the leather.
The porch light is on. The curtains are not.
“Right,”
she says, to nobody, and gets out.
The car door slams behind her and she is up the path in four strides. Then she knocks — two flat hits of her fist, hard enough to be heard at the back of the house — and pushes her hands into her jacket pockets so that nobody can see them shaking.
The lock turns. It is you, of course it is you, standing in your own doorway in an old shirt with the lamp low behind you, and she has to decide, in the half-second before she speaks, whether she is going to be civil tonight.
“She called me,”
Sidonie says, and does not move out of the cold.
“Whatever this is, she asked me here for it. So let me in, and we can do it in the warm where the whole street is not watching.”