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I told you I’d be paying for that until the day I died.

If you had made it only to the very end of the service, you would have heard Pastor Summersby ask me if I would take Wisper, then heard Pastor Winterly ask Wisper if she would take me, and you would have heard each of us—as though there was no better moment in our lives—sigh out that single word, “yes.”

And then you would have seen us kiss—warmly—deeply— lovingly.

Bloop.

Damn.

And you would have heard everyone in the church either gasp, or chuckle, or both.

“Well,” Wisper said, smiling down at it, then back up to me. “Let’s go do something about that.”

“Okay,” I said.

And so, we did.

Later that evening, Mayor Boone, sitting by himself in bed— naked, pale, reading a Scientific American article about hyperspace and pretending to understand—was trying hard not to think about what Wisper and I were doing at that particular moment, when suddenly, out of the dark and the silence that his home had lately been filled with, he heard the faraway tinkling sound of breaking glass somewhere on the ground floor below.

Chilled and terrified, he grabbed the bat he always kept at hand since Washburne had gone off, slipped into his long-dead wife’s fluffy, pink slippers, and moved slowly down the stairs, creaking that damned third one more than he had intended to, and paused. Waiting.

No one seemed to hear.

After a few deep breaths, he finished descending and crept around the corner of the foyer, heading toward the dim, moonlit kitchen. His heart skipped a beat, and his breathing accelerated when he saw a shadow flit past the window above the sink, heading in the direction of the knives, forks, and other sharpened instruments.

Suppressing his fear and burying it beneath mounting anger, and a creeping sense of violation, he raised the bat over his head and moved quietly through the archway that opened into the kitchen from the dining room. His heart pounded like the deposit-covered piston of a car that doesn’t use the right fuel additive, and nearly seized when he heard a rubber seal break and watched light slowly, insistently, spread outward from the opening of his refrigerator door.

He was struck to the core at whom the light revealed.

A woman. A stranger. Searching for food.

Not Washburne.

Mayor Boone reached for the nearby switch and ignited the overhead recessed lighting, flooding the room with illumination and momentarily blinding the lady, who shielded her eyes and winced at its intensity.

The uninvited guest stood, slowly, and turned to him with no apparent fear, shame, or concern, continuing to chew on whatever she had taken from his fridge. As she looked him over, taking in his naked, aging physique, and poofy, pink slippers, she took another bite and chewed deliberately, almost defiantly.

For a long moment they stared at one another in silence.

She was dirty, smallish, and thin, but tough looking, rugged, and tan. She wore nothing more than smears of mud, and a revealing, makeshift bikini fashioned from what appeared to be wet, pungent, animal skin. Her hair was wild and filled with bits of dried leaves, grass, and twigs, and she smacked her lips as she finished the piece of what the mayor now saw was this evening’s brisket, tossing the bare bone back over her shoulder and into the sink.

As Boone stared in awe, she grabbed another hunk of meat from behind the door she still held open and ripped away another, brazen bite.

Slowly, apparently certain now that Boone was no threat, she let her eyes wander around, and over the opulence of the kitchen, taking in its expensive cutlery, cookware, and furnishings with practiced, discerning eyes.

“So,” she said at last, “You’re rich.”

Boone stared a moment longer, then shook his head to loosen the gears.

“Yes,” he said, and suddenly got nervous, squeezing the bat a little tighter. “You want money?”

The woman smiled and ignored his question. “You single?”

“I…what?” Boone asked, slowly, confused, and unsure where this was going. “I’m…yes. My wife died…many years ago, and I have a son, but…well…he’s