Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

3 Patriotic Canadians Will Not Hoard Food! ^{Madeline Ashby}

IT WAS JUST AFTER THREE IN THE AFTERNOON ON THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN when the man from Toronto showed up for the third time.

“Again?” Dionisia asked. “Seriously?”

Erin chewed some of the skin flaking away from her lower lip. A dry fall was better for the wheat, but it was murder on the skin. Erin watched the man jump down out of his rented black truck. He was trying to dress like a local, this time: all-season boots, jeans, a collared shirt under some kind of tactical outdoor jacket that seemingly couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be green or gray. She watched him amble up the drive, boots crunching in the gravel, as he squinted at all the pumpkins dotting the path. Most of them had already been carved, and he was clearly trying to identify some of the faces.

“He probably thinks the third time’s a charm,” Erin said.

“Is it?” Dionisia asked.

Erin twisted the linen tea towel in her hands into a rope and playfully snapped Dionisia with it. “Fuck off. Of course not. I don’t even know why he keeps showing up.”

Dionisia arched her pierced eyebrow. “Oh, you don’t, eh? Well, I do.”

Erin rolled her eyes. “You say that about everyone.”

“You’re the last single woman under forty in Dowling who doesn’t already have children of her own.”

“So I’m a withered old crone, is what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying you live in a house with seven bedrooms and you could be filling them up.”

“But then where would you and Ruthie live?”

Erin always asked this question whenever this conversation came up. But this time, Dionisia had an answer: “We’d take the place over the garage! There’s a whole finished apartment up there that you could be renting!”

Erin held up a finger. “This is because I’ve made molletes too often this week, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You’re going to get scurvy.”

“Beans and cheese on toast is a perfectly reasonable—”

The doorbell rang. Erin sighed deeply. She rolled her head back and closed her eyes. Her neck crunched audibly. She wasn’t sure if the tension in her tendons was due to the man outside, or the offer he kept making, or how much harder it became to refuse each time. Whatever it was, it was playing hell with her jaw. “If we ignore him, do you think he’ll go away?”

“Did he go away the other two times?”

The doorbell rang again. Erin growled in the back of her throat, and made for the door. Callum Carruthers—he sounded like a bad guy on an old Hollywood Sunday night prestige series, like Don Draper or Walter White—stood on the screen porch with his finger hovering over the button.

“Hi, Miss Landry, I’m here to—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Erin muttered. She pushed out the front door and onto the screen porch. There were still a couple of pumpkins out there in need of carving, and she took one of the Muskoka chairs and hauled a pumpkin into her lap. She picked up the Sharpie marker she’d left on the pulp-strewn towels, and started absently drumming with it on what would eventually become the jack o’lantern’s face. As she did, a white pickup truck drove past the farm, blaring music. She had to pause and let its noise doppler away before speaking.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” she said.

Carruthers took the Muskoka chair opposite hers. He was too big for it, just like he was too big for everything in the house: his knees seemed almost level with his chest even sitting down. The first time he’d come inside he kept shifting uncomfortably on the antique chairs around the dining table, as though he were terrified of breaking them. It made the whole process torturously slow, and the second time he came around, Erin moved him to the living room, and that was somehow worse, because he kept staring at all of Ruthie’s paintings and Erin had the weird feeling he wanted to make some absurd grand gesture of buying them all, just to prove he wasn’t a total monster or something.

Now they looked out from the screen porch and onto the winding gravel drive and the scarecrows guarding the raised vegetable beds in the front garden. The first hard frost was still a few weeks away; after that, she could take in the Brussels sprouts and other brassicas.

“It’ll look nice when they’re all lit up like that,” he said. “The pumpkins. There are more, now.”

“They’re supposed to keep away evil spirits, you know.”

“And yet, I still keep showing up. Is that what you’re getting at?”

Erin shrugged. “It’s a free country. So if you really like Dowling all that much, I can’t stop you from hanging around.”

“It is actually growing on me. I have a thing for the croque madame at Tweed’s.”

The white pickup truck with the music passed by again. She frowned. To make that turn, they must have either sped way up to hit the nearest intersection, or pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road. Not that there was a lot of traffic, but the OPP drones were getting better at identifying offenders all the time.

“It’s better with mustard than jam,” she heard herself say.

“I know. I asked them to skip the jam after the first time.”

Erin eyed him. “I’m not going to sell you the land just because we have the same taste in breakfast sandwiches, you know.”

“I could tell you my latté order,” he said, without missing a beat. “Would that help?”

“I’m a tea person.”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course you are.”

“So, show me the goods.”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Your tablet. Your pitch. All your fancy concept art and mockups and storyboards and whatnot. I want to see the drone footage of my farm that I never authorized anyone to shoot.”

He snorted. “I left the tablet in the truck. There’s no point.”

“Finally, we agree.” She scowled. “If you know I’m going to decline the offer a third time, what are you doing here?”

With difficulty, Carruthers twisted a little in his Muskoka chair to face her more directly. “I want to hear, in detail, why you’re refusing me.”

“Refusing you? This isn’t an Austen novel, Mr. Carruthers—”

“It’s Callum. And that’s good, because Georgette Heyer is better.” Before she could tell him she had no room for blasphemers in her home, he added: “I want to hear why you’re saying no, so I can tell the people I’m representing. I want them to know exactly why they won’t be bonusing me this year.”

Erin rubbed the thumb and index finger of her left hand together. “Hold on, let me string up the tiniest violin in the world for this song.”

“I’m serious! I want to know.” He held up his open hands. “Think of it this way. You’re providing me with on-the-job training. If you explain your…” She watched him struggle for the right word. By now she knew his little tics and tells. He wasn’t as good at this whole real estate development thing as he thought he was. For a moment he’d gotten perilously close to the word feelings, but that would make her sound like an over-emotional feminine stereotype. And line of reasoning would have made her sound like her intellect was somehow compromised. He’d boxed himself in. “Your perspective,” he said, finally. “If you share your perspective with me, one more time, I’ll be able to consider other situations like this one from that perspective. I can learn how other prospective clients might be approaching a sale like this one. So I can be, you know, more sensitive. To their needs.”

Erin cleared her throat. She sat up a little taller in her Muskoska chair. “I don’t know why a simple no shouldn’t suffice. It sounds to me like your firm has issues around consent.”

“That’s probably true.” When she looked at him in surprise, he shrugged. “What? I’m not trying to snow you, here. You know bullshit when you smell it. I respect that. But my wanting to know more about why you’re declining our offer isn’t bullshit. I think our offer could fundamentally transform—”

“Here it comes—”

“Fundamentally transform not just your life, but the lives of countless children and young adults. Building a fully air-gapped, quarantine-safe boarding school on 190 acres, with room for an agricultural and veterinary program, and trails for horse therapy, could enrich the lives of children whose parents can’t afford tutors and nannies, whose parents have made the heartbreaking decision to send them away for their own safety—”

Erin uncapped her Sharpie as though unsheathing a sword, and made a show of very deliberately ignoring him. She focused narrowly on drawing a face across the warty, dimpled flesh of the pumpkin. She considered how complicated it might be just to draw a big dollar sign, and whether it would get her point across.

“Can you guarantee the school won’t be private?”

“Well, no, it’s a public-private partnership. You know that; we’ve gone over that. There are several sponsors from the Toronto-Waterloo tech corridor—”

“So this theoretical school would have all kinds of smart-building sensor technology—”

“Yes—”

“Which means it’s spying on the kids, and there’s probably spyware in all their tablets, and there’s probably corporate propaganda from the sponsors, everywhere from the restaurants on campus to the infirmary. And that’s another thing: can you guarantee that the students who need it will get access to birth control? The virus isn’t the only thing those kids have to worry about. Are we talking a dusty little dish of free condoms, or IUDs on demand? What happens when one of those kids needs the morning after pill? It’s a boarding school, after all, things happen—”

“We haven’t gotten that far, yet, but—”

“I’m not selling.” Erin made her voice as flat as possible. “I know that a small farm that grows government grain for the ration—”

“Is that truck lost?” The music from the white pickup truck had returned. Carruthers was sitting up in his chair. His whole body pointed forward like a dog who’d nosed a rabbit. On the wood armrests of his chair, his knuckles had gone white. “Why are they slowing down?”

“Get down,” Erin said, and rolled smoothly out of her seat to the floor. “GET DOWN!”

But he wasn’t getting down. He was standing up. His mouth hung slack and his head tilted, like he was trying to make out the image on a buffering video signal, and he turned to look at her stretched flat across the floorboards. Erin knew that her sense of time was dilating, stretching, that only a single agonizing second had passed, but it felt like he was standing there in the open for hours. For some reason, the music seemed so much louder. So much closer. “What are you—”

And then the dry pops started.

It took a seeming eternity for him to realize what was happening. And then he was covering her, his chest to her back and his fingers curled over her head, covering her eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

The pops stopped. The music remained. Erin wondered if she would hear their boots on the gravel, over all that music. Probably not. Especially not with this huge wall of man covering her. She would not have time to push him off and go for the deer rifle inside the house. She would not have time to find the hatchet duct-taped to the bottom of the coffee table. She would not have time to pick up the high-intensity water gun, propped innocently beside the front door, and shoot them with the industrial-grade bleach hidden in its modified glass tanks.

But then she heard laughter, and the truck revving its engine, and the music retreating. And then nothing but Carruthers’s breath, fast and light across her neck, and his heart hammering at her back like it wanted inside.

“Dowling still growing on you?” She squirmed and twisted until she was facing him. “Or are you reconsidering the property values in this area?”

He blinked at her and she realized his eyes were bright and wet. “What?” he asked, and his voice was thick.

“I was just asking—”

“This isn’t fucking funny. How can you fucking joke about this, Jesus God, we just got fucking shot at—”

The front door creaked open and they turned to see Dionisia army-crawling her way out the threshold. “You’re okay,” she said, and smiled.

Erin threaded her arm through a gap in the cage of Carruthers’s body and reached for the other woman. “Are you?”

Dionisia snorted. “I was in the bathroom. When I heard what was happening I hid in the shower.”

“Ruthie?”

“She was in the studio in the back. Headphones on; she didn’t hear a thing.” Dionisia jingled the watch on her wrist. “I had to text her for an answer.”

As if on cue, Ruthie burst into the screen porch. Her hands were covered in red. For a moment Erin’s heart entered her throat, until she realized the crimson streaks down Ruthie’s arms and tank top and shorts were paint. It was the same deep vermilion as her dyed hair. She’d been working on some kind of epic self-portrait this month. “Oh my God,” Ruthie was saying. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here…” She took a series of delicate steps around Carruthers and Erin. “Oh, hi, nice to see you again, mister real estate developer guy. Some fun, eh?”

Carruthers said nothing. He didn’t move. For once he seemed incapable of making a witty retort or mocking remark. He just kept looking from Ruthie to Dionisia to Erin and back again, as though he were waiting for something. Screaming, maybe. Hysterical tears. Anything but Erin’s jokes and the wives kissing each other in between nervous laughter.

“We should…” His mouth seemed to have trouble forming words. “We have to call the police, we have to do something—”

“You have to get off me, first,” Erin said, and tried wriggling free of him.

His attention snapped back to her, and she watched him look her over and realize the awkwardness of their position. “Oh. Shit.” He sat up on his haunches. “Sorry. Fuck. Sorry.”

“No worries,” Erin said, and wriggled the rest of the way. She sat up and stood carefully. There were no holes in the screen. No holes in the windows. They’d aimed squarely at the scarecrows, then, the same as last year. Only this time, they’d attacked in broad daylight. “You should check your truck,” she said. “The tires, I mean. It’s probably just BBs, or buckshot, or rock salt, but—”

“Just buckshot?” Carruthers hopped to his feet. He loomed over her, six feet four inches of ginger Viking sunburn and spanking new gentleman farmer cosplay from Mountain Equipment Co-op. “What the hell are you saying, just buckshot? Jesus Christ, Erin—”

“There’s a jack in my truck, if you need it, but I don’t think—”

“Erin!” His voice was ground glass. When she looked at him, his breath was still fast and his fists clenched and unclenched. He was rigid, trembling, a wire about to snap. He swallowed. He pointed out the screen porch, at the fallen scarecrows. “What the fuck just happened?”

Erin followed the line of his finger to the lengthening shadows outside. Abruptly she realized that whatever had transpired for her, something else entirely had transpired for him, and it had revived something in him that he’d likely worked very hard to bury. A phobia, or worse, a memory. “Maybe we should take this inside,” she said.

RUTHIE HAD LIT A SWEETGRASS BRAID AND WAS METHODICALLY CLEANSING THE house, all the doors and windows top to bottom, while Dionisia fussed in the washroom for a CBD nerve tonic.

“I’ve got a nice rhubarb gin from Niagara, if you’re interested,” Erin said, with her head in the freezer.

“What?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, and pulled out the bottle and some ice. She found her grandmother’s nice lustre carnival glass tumblers, and topped the gin with club soda and the brandied cherries she usually reserved for Manhattans. The more sugar the better, after moments like this. She remembered that much. After a moment’s digging she found a purple Quality Street tin at the back of the pantry, shook it to determine there were still some chocolates inside, and emerged with their drinks and the candy on a tray. She set the tray on a table between the armchair where Carruthers sat, a quilt haphazardly thrown over him, and the sofa. She found a place on the sofa, picked up her glass, and gently tapped the bottom of it against the top of his. “Your health.”

He picked up the glass shakily, but didn’t drink from it. Erin made sure to slurp hers noisily, and this seemed to clue him in that he should do the same.

“What,” he croaked, “the fuck.”

“The neighborhood kids don’t really like me,” Erin said. “Well. I take that back. Some of them don’t like me. Mostly their parents don’t like me, I think, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I put little disposable masks on my scarecrows.”

She made the universal gesture for masking up.

“That’s just a visual reminder, though. Of my politics. Of how I’m different. How this farm is different.”

He frowned. “What’s so different about it? Aside from the fact that it happens to be situated on prime land for educating young people.”

His voice was still hollow, but he was coming back to himself a little. That was good.

“Because, we still farm for the ration card program.” Erin gestured at the vintage wartime propaganda poster hanging on one wall. It read PATRIOTIC CANADIANS WILL NOT HOARD FOOD and it depicted a couple hiding their sacks of flour from a constable outside.

“We still blockchain every part of our process to guarantee we know where potential contamination and outbreaks happen, and give our vendors chain of custody. E. coli? Listeria? Salmonella? An outbreak among the workers? With the ledgers we know exactly where it happened. End-to-end, full transparency. We started doing that because it was a requirement of the ration program. Anyone participating had to meet the food security regulations. But we still do it. That’s why my buyers are loyal. My product is guaranteed. But everyone else in this area…”

She drew a circle in the air. “Everyone else in this area, the moment the ration exchange switched to a voluntary program, they quit so they could try selling at higher prices and get by with fewer regulations. But I still get subsidized labor and equipment, and as a participant I’m still legally allowed to sell my excess at lower prices, so everyone comes to me first. Meanwhile they started growing these designer American grains with their own goddamn end user license agreement, and those designer grains couldn’t handle our winters, and, well…” She shrugged. “You know the Salem witch trials were actually about real estate? The accused had properties everyone else wanted. All the finger-pointing about devil worship was really just a roundabout way toward asset forfeiture.”

She watched him watching Ruthie sweep the air with her smudging braid. “I did not know that.”

“It’s true. You can look it up.” She wrestled open the tin of chocolates. “Eat something.”

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “I don’t eat refined—”

“Don’t be an asshole. Eat the fucking candy.”

Meekly, he picked out a single candy and began twisting it open. “I could be diabetic, you know.”

“If you were diabetic you wouldn’t be eating breakfast sandwiches at Tweed’s.”

He snorted. Then he popped the chocolate in his mouth. It was like watching someone hit a reset button on him. He went fully still for a moment, then relaxed utterly, while a groan issued from behind his closed lips.

“I forgot,” he said, finally. “I forgot how good these were.”

“Sucralose is Satan’s sweetener,” Erin said.

He laughed, short and sharp, like he didn’t really mean to. And then he reached for another. Erin reached for her own.

“So that’s it, huh?”

“That’s the long and the short of it,” Erin answered. “I’m still a part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security’s rationing program, and my neighbours don’t like it. I sell product at lower prices than they do, and I pay less for parts and labor than they do, and my demand is more predictable than theirs, and apparently that pisses them off. Of course what really pisses them off, deep down, is that I’m helping the government give handouts, or whatever, and it burns them up that some refugee kids from Yemen might, like, actually get to enjoy some French toast made from my grain.”

Carruthers drained his drink. “Don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel.”

Erin gave him a very halfhearted version of the finger and sipped more of her drink. “This program is the closest thing Canada has ever had to food stamps, or SNAP or EBT or whatever it’s called, and it’s been good for my bottom line. Did you know that Canada raised half of England’s grain during the Second World War? There’s absolutely no excuse for us not to feed our own people. It’s total and complete bullshit that we never had something like this before, and I for one am not going to abandon it just because the crisis is allegedly over.”

Carruthers remained uncharacteristically silent and she caught herself missing the friction. Ranting was easier than processing. Anger was easier than vulnerability. Not that she felt any particular need to justify her decisions, but explaining them in detail filled the silence that would otherwise be filled with the realization that yes, they’d attacked her farm, just like last year and the year before, and that they were growing bolder with each passing autumn.

“I was a card holder, once,” he said, as though there had been no break in the conversation. “In university. The ration card, I mean. The points. I mean I know everyone technically has one, they technically have a number for everybody, but I was a regular user. For a while it seemed like the only way to get groceries in Toronto, because of the railway blockades and the tariffs and the meatpacking shutdown. It was the only guaranteed system. Unless you had a good relationship with the guy at your corner store.”

Erin drained what was left of her drink and stood to make her way to the kitchen. “And I’m guessing you didn’t have one of those?”

“Well, no.” He stood to follow her. She reached into the freezer and brought out the bottle, plus a tray of ice. Then she moved into the dining room and found the carnival glass pitcher that matched the tumblers on her grandmother’s sideboard. When she turned around Carruthers was in the threshold between the kitchen and dining room, filling the door so effectively that she couldn’t weave around him.

“Everything here seems so delicate,” he said, out of nowhere. “All this glass. The plates on the rail up there. The lace on the table. It’s all so… breakable. Everything in here. It just seems really tiny and fragile.”

Erin craned her neck back to look him in the face. “What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing,” he said, swallowing, and he moved aside to let her through. Erin snapped the ice tray and poured ice cubes halfway into the pitcher, then wedged the bottle of gin inside. “Where are the others?”

“Dio and Ruthie?” Erin listened carefully. She heard the sound of the shower running. “Probably blowing off steam.”

Carruthers went red to the roots of his hair. “Oh.”

“Everyone decompresses differently.” She carried the gin and the club soda into the living room, set them on the tray, and started pouring. “Do you still want to call the police?”

He watched her pouring and held up two fingers when she’d poured enough for him. “Yeah. I should look at the truck, first. Check the tires, like you said. It’s a company car; it has front and rear cameras. They might have caught something. A face, a plate number. Worth a look, anyway.”

Erin hadn’t thought of this as a possibility. But it was one of the advantages, if there could be such a thing, of having been attacked in the afternoon. There was enough light for a camera to pick up something. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”

Carruthers fussed with his device. Erin suspected he was downloading the footage from the car. “Have you ever pressed charges?” he asked.

“The first year, I tried to,” she said. “But the investigation didn’t go anywhere. Every year I take pictures, and we have a camera rigged up at the front door, but they’ve never come close enough.”

“The first year?”

“Probably the year before the ration program went voluntary,” she said. “I made my opinion pretty clear, and, well, so did they.”

Carruthers put his device down and massaged his temples. “That’s like five years, Erin.”

Erin wasn’t sure when exactly she had switched from Miss Landry to Erin, but it seemed like a permanent shift. “Well, there was a break, the second year. I think one of them must have been sick. Or on probation for something else, maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t expect it to continue.”

“And you report it? Every year?”

“If only to establish a paper trail,” she said. “Much good that it’s done me.”

“Well, this time, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be the one who makes the call.” He flipped his device around to show her the image of a license plate slowly resolving into clarity.

TALKING TO THE POLICE WAS VERY DIFFERENT WHEN YOU WERE A MAN, APPARENTLY.

“You see, my company,” Carruthers flashed the logo on his tablet, “is looking to make significant investment in this property, but I have to say I find this history of violence and vandalism extremely concerning.”

It was evening by the time an officer of the Greater Sudbury Police Service arrived, a Sikh man whose bracelet glittered in the growing dark when Erin opened the door. They received him in the dining room amidst all the fragile things Carruthers was so nervous about, and they served him warm apple cider from their own orchards, and he was deliberate and attentive and he took notes on a big chunky tablet whose case seemed designed to survive an explosion.

“And you’ve reported this activity before,” Officer Singh said.

“Yes,” Erin and Carruthers said, in unison.

Officer Singh frowned. “One at a time, please.”

Erin nodded. “Yes. I’ve reported it. I’ve uploaded all my photos and video to your website, every year.”

“And I can do the same,” Carruthers added.

“Thank you. Ma’am, if you could forward me your confirmation numbers from those uploads, that would help.” Erin nodded, and Officer Singh used his stylus to point between the two of them. “And you, sir, were here to discuss the purchase of the land?”

“Yes. I’m the manager of this account, and I like to take a very hands-on approach,” Carruthers ignored the sudden snort from Dionisia, but the officer didn’t, “and that’s why I was here. And thank God, because now we have this video, and now something can finally be done. Right?”

His voice invited no argument. Erin felt him looming in the chair beside her like a warm shadow, not touching but not distant either, and for a moment she remembered the sudden darkness of his hand over her eyes, as though he too had expected her windows to shatter all around them. She shuddered for just a second, and instantly felt him put his hand on the table beside hers, not touching but within reach. Officer Singh noticed the movement, and his nostrils flared slightly.

“And, ma’am, regarding the sale of this land, for how long have you been in negotiations with this man? With his company?”

“Um,” Erin looked at Carruthers. Suddenly it was difficult to remember that afternoon, much less the past year. “It’s been—”

“I sent my first letter to you in February,” Carruthers said. “And then I called you every month after that, to update you on plans for the boarding school.”

“Right.” Erin nodded at the officer. “That’s correct.”

“So these incidents started before there was any offer made to purchase the land?”

“What are you implying?” Carruthers asked.

“Sir, I’m not implying anything, I simply want to know if—”

“If you think I would ever hire some fucking goons to intimidate one of my accounts—”

“Sir, there’s no need for that kind of language—”

“They fucking shot at us, Officer Singh. They pointed guns at this farm. A farm, by the way, which has queer women of color living on it, which might technically make this a hate crime, which means they have every right to bring the full force of the Ontario Provincial Police down on these kids if your department won’t—”

“Callum,” Erin said, and when he turned to her his face was white with high spots of red spattered across his cheekbones, and his chest was rising and falling as it had on the screen porch after the shooting. “It sounds like Officer Singh really does want to help. I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“I assure you that something will be done,” Officer Singh said. “This is really troubling. For all the reasons you mentioned. Now, ma’am, I have to ask: do you feel safe, here? Incidents of vandalism do go up a little around Halloween, usually just kids smashing pumpkins, but with your particular history, you might have more cause for concern.”

“Thank you,” Erin said. “For asking. Dionisia? Ruthie? How do you feel?”

The two women glanced at each other. “Well, there are three of us here,” Dionisia said. “And you have the deer rifle—”

“I’m staying,” Carruthers said. When everyone frowned at him, he hastily added: “In the area, I mean. I’m staying in the area. Until we finalize our negotiations.”

“For the land,” Officer Singh said.

“Yes. For the land.”

Officer Singh raised his eyebrows, but nodded. “Okay. Sure. Well, let me get to work on this, and I’ll be in touch.”

They saw him out, and when Erin wandered back into the kitchen Callum was washing her grandmother’s teacups by hand, very carefully, as though still afraid of breaking them. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

He stared out the window over the sink. “I needed something to do with my hands.”

“Well I have a couple of acres’ worth of corn that needs shucking, if you’re into that kind of thing,” Erin said.

He shook his head ruefully. “I have…” He cleared his throat. “I was downtown. During the Canada Day attack. I was in the subway.”

The hairs on Erin’s arms rose. “I’m sorry. No wonder today was—”

“Yeah.” He wiped something from his face with the sleeve of his upper arm. “Yeah, it was. You’re a lot better at this kind of thing than I am. You’re a lot tougher than I am.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.” Erin tried to smile. “I mean, most other people find me pretty prickly and awful to deal with, but not you. You just seem to take it in stride.”

He snorted, but said nothing.

“You extended your stay? At your rental?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean I will, but I haven’t. Yet. But the officer has a point: I don’t know if Devil’s Night is a thing out here, but—”

“Have you even checked your tires?” Erin asked, suddenly catching on.

“No.” He set the last teacup upside down on its drying mat, aligning it with the others just so, and turned to face her. “No, I have not.”

“So you don’t even know if you can get out of here.”

“I’m pretty sure I can’t, actually,” he said. “In fact I’m pretty sure I’m…” He licked his lips. “I think the technical term is ensnared. I’m pretty sure I’m ensnared, Erin.”

She swallowed in a dry throat. “Oh. It’s… like that?”

“It’s like that.” His eyes widened. “I mean, not that I’m asking for anything specific, I can sleep in my car—”

“Don’t be an asshole,” she said, lifting the back of her hand to whack his arm. But he caught her hand before she could make contact, and he held onto it, running his thumb over her wrist. She stared at their linked hands. “I hope you know I’m still not going to sell,” she said. “If I haven’t sold this land after five years of having my scarecrows shot up, I sure as hell am not going to sell because you happen to be very—”

“Very?” He was grinning.

Erin looked at the teacups all in a row. “Detail-oriented.”

“Erin,” he said, “you have no idea.”