By the fourth evening, Dhruv had run out of legitimate excuses to be at the fence, which did not stop him from inventing increasingly ridiculous illegitimate ones.

"The dog again," he announced, appearing at the low pine boundary just as Zoya was coiling up her hose for the night. "The gap in the fence. Aman's very worried about the dog situation."

"There is no dog, Dhruv. I've lived here eleven years. I would know if there were a recurring dog situation."

"It's a very elusive dog. Possibly supernatural. Definitely responsible for at least forty percent of my visits to this fence."

"And the other sixty percent?"

"Unrelated hydrangea concerns." He leaned against the post, hands in his pockets, watching her with the particular open, unguarded attention that she still hadn't decided what to do with. "Also, I'm bored out of my mind, and you're the only interesting thing within a hundred meters that isn't Aman's spreadsheet of grievances."

"That's flattering. Truly."

"I contain multitudes of flattery. Ask anyone." He nodded toward the badminton racket propped against her porch rail, the strings gone soft with age. "You play?"

"Used to. School team, years ago. Haven't picked one up since." She followed his gaze, something wistful crossing her face before she smoothed it away. "Why?"

"Because I used to be genuinely excellent at this sport, before laptops replaced rackets in my life story, and I am currently experiencing what I believe is called an identity crisis, and reclaiming past glories seems like exactly the kind of productive coping mechanism a man in my situation requires."

"Your situation being 'unemployed and mysteriously flinchy.'"

"Precisely that situation, yes." He was already climbing over the low fence with more enthusiasm than grace, nearly catching his ankle on the top rail. "Get the racket. I'll teach you things your school team clearly never covered."

"I was captain of my school team, Dhruv."

"Even better. I love a challenge."

She should have said no. She thought about saying no for exactly as long as it took to retrieve the old racket from the porch, dust it off, and discover that some old, competitive muscle memory in her hands remembered exactly how good it had felt, once, to want to win something loudly.

They played in the last of the fading light, in the narrow strip of lawn between the two properties, and within four points it became abundantly, hilariously clear that Dhruv Rana's self-reported badminton excellence had not survived nine years of desk work nearly as well as he'd claimed.

"You said you were good at this."

"I said I used to be good at this. There's a statute of limitations on athletic ability, Zoya, it's called aging, it happens to everyone eventually."

"You're twenty-nine."

"Twenty-nine is basically elderly, in badminton years." He lunged for a shot she'd placed with deliberate, merciless precision just out of his reach, missed entirely, and went down hard onto the frost-stiffened grass with a sound of pure, wounded dignity. "That shuttlecock had personal animosity toward me. I could feel it."

She was laughing too hard to hit her next serve properly, doubled over with her hands braced on her knees, and he stayed exactly where he'd fallen, flat on his back in the grass, watching her laugh with an expression she caught only because she happened to glance over at the wrong — or precisely the right — moment: something unguarded and stunned and entirely without performance, like a man who had just been handed something he hadn't let himself want in a very long time.

"What," she said, catching her breath, "is that face."

"What face?"

"You're looking at me like I've grown a second head."

"I'm looking at you," he said, sitting up slowly, grass in his hair, "like a man who forgot, somewhere in the last three weeks of running for his life, what it felt like to just be somewhere ordinary, doing something stupid, laughing at nothing in particular. That's all. It's not a complicated face."

Something in her chest did a slow, unfamiliar turn at the plain honesty of it — no joke wrapped around the admission, no deflection, just a fact handed over quietly in the dark. She sat down beside him in the frosty grass, close enough that their shoulders touched, and neither of them moved to close the last inch of distance, though both of them, she suspected, were aware of exactly how little of it remained.

"I haven't laughed like this in years," she admitted, watching her own breath fog in the cold air rather than look at him directly. "Not the polite kind. Not the kind you do at dinner parties because it's expected. The real, stupid, undignified kind."

"Since when?"

"Since I was nineteen, probably. There was a year — I'll tell you about it eventually, maybe, when it feels less like handing someone a loaded weapon — where laughing loudly in this house felt like a betrayal of how carefully everyone else was holding themselves together. I got out of the habit. Didn't notice how much I'd gotten out of it until about four days ago, watching a strange man commit crimes against a hydrangea bush."

Dhruv was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into the register she was starting to recognize as his real one, the one underneath all the performance. "For what it's worth," he said, "I'd very much like to keep being the reason you laugh badly and undignified in cold grass, for as long as you'll let me be underfoot. No pressure attached. Just — an application, formally submitted, for the role of Person Who Ruins Your Composure Occasionally."

"That's a terrible job title."

"I'm workshopping it." He nudged her shoulder gently with his. "Is the position open?"

She looked at him — grass-stained, ridiculous, entirely too handsome for how badly he'd just lost at badminton, watching her with a hope he wasn't bothering to hide anymore — and felt some old, careful wall inside her shift half an inch, just enough to let something warmer through.

"The position," she said slowly, "might be open. Provisionally. Pending further review of your athletic capabilities, which are currently disqualifying."

"I accept the provisional terms." He grinned, the real one, unguarded and a little dazed, like a man who had just won something considerably more important than a badminton match. "I'll have you know I intend to appeal that athletic assessment vigorously, at length, over many future evenings."

"I look forward to watching you lose again."

"So do I," he said, quietly, meaning something else entirely, and neither of them moved from the cold grass for a long while after that, shoulder to shoulder, watching the last light drain out of the sky over two properties that no longer felt, to either of them, like they belonged to separate people at all.