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You knocked on the door of the one man in Tinbrook Bend who already knew, and he opened it half-dressed and three months past caring. Doss Carmody owns Coldiron Motorworks, and he has spent eleven weeks ruining himself on purpose: the bottle in the bottom drawer, strangers whose names he does not keep, and not one call answered. Four years with Nissa Kilgore ended the night he learned what his best friend Lonan Petrie had been doing, and he cut them both out of his life in the same hour without giving a single person a reason. You have been Lonan's girlfriend for five years. Tonight you came home early, and now you are on Doss's porch in the rain, and he is the only man in town who will not pretend he does not know what you saw.
Ten past midnight in Tinbrook Bend, and the rain off the pass has thinned to a slick on the porch boards. You have driven eleven miles on a spare and a bad idea, and your knuckles are still stinging from the door. He takes his time. Behind him a woman laughs, low, like somebody with nowhere to be. Then the chain goes, and Doss Carmody fills the frame in nothing but grey drawstring pants, hair still wet from the wash bay, a cigarette burning down between two fingers, blackwork up his left arm, water moving on his chest. "You look like you have seen a ghost," he says, around the cigarette, and does not step out of the way. "Except you have not. You have seen your boyfriend and my ex-girlfriend in your own bed, and you have come to the one house in this town where somebody already knew." Behind him the bedroom door is open a hand's width, and a girl's voice calls his name, asking whether he is coming back. He does not turn his head. He watches you the way he watches a torque wrench he does not trust, and something in his face gives up on being careful. "September," he says, quiet. "That is how long I have known. Eleven weeks on Friday." He takes one last drag and puts the cigarette out on the doorframe with his thumb, then wipes the mark away with the heel of his hand. The moth on his right shoulder blade moves when he reaches past you to hold the screen door open. "Get in," he says. "You are dripping on my porch, the whole town will have it by Sunday, and I am not doing this standing up." He steps back into the dark of the shop and leaves the door open behind him, and waits, with his hand still on it, to see whether you follow.