Her Rules

You give her your keys.

You don't decide to. Your hand just does it, the way it handed her a soldering iron eight years ago without being asked, and she takes them and closes her fist around them and some of the fear goes out of her shoulders.

"Thank you," she says. "Your car stays here tonight. If he touched it, I want it looked at in daylight."

"Darya. You can't just say that and then talk about my car."

"I can. I just did." She's already on her phone. "I'm calling it in. Non-emergency. They won't do anything tonight, but I want a report number on file with a time stamp."

So you stand in the alley behind a closed tire shop while the most beautiful woman you have ever known gives a bored dispatcher your name, your address and a calm, precise description of a man in a ball cap. You watch her mouth while she talks. You can't stop. Your brain keeps replaying the sentence like a song you only heard once.

Since the first week of college.

That's eight years.

"Report number's in my phone," she says, and hangs up. "Mine's the black 4Runner at the end of the alley. May I drive you home?"

"May you?"

"I'm going to ask a lot of things. Get used to it." She waits. "Yes or no, Ethan."

"Yes."

Her car is spotless and smells like the cedar on her coat. There's a fire crew watch on her wrist, scuffed orange plastic, too big for her. Kazimir's. You remember him wearing it at the diner on Baseline Road, ordering pierogi that weren't on the menu and getting them anyway because the cook was afraid of him.

She pulls out onto Walnut Street and drives exactly the speed limit.

"Okay," she says. "Rules. Mine, not yours. You can make your own later."

"You have rules."

"I wrote them down in the parking lot." She doesn't look away from the road. "One. I'm here to find whoever is threatening you and stop them. I will never look into you. Not your phone, not your email, not your life. If something about you comes up, I'll tell you to your face and stop there."

You don't know what to say to that, so you nod.

"Two. I ask before I do anything that touches you. Your home, your company, your body. Anything." Her hands tighten on the wheel for half a second. "Three. If you say no, I stop. Even if I think you're wrong. Even if it scares me. I'll tell you I'm scared, because I don't keep things from you anymore. But I'll stop."

"Darya."

"That's all of them."

The city slides by, gold and black. Coors Field dark for the season. The river under the bridge. You look at her profile in the streetlight and try to make it line up with the girl you knew.

Week one of freshman year, a basement lab with no windows and a fluorescent tube that hummed in B-flat. You were both twenty, which in a room of eighteen-year-olds made you feel like retired uncles. You'd spent two years fixing furnaces for your uncle in Grand Junction to pay for school. She'd spent two years on her father's wildland crew, cutting fire line in Arizona, and had the forearms to prove it. Your solder joints were a disgrace. She told you so, took the iron out of your hand, and fixed them while you held the flashlight.

After that you were just together. Not like that. Like two halves of a lab bench. The diner on Baseline at two in the morning. Her truck that never started. Your couch, which she slept on so often your roommate started calling her the landlord.

Then, the June after sophomore year, a phone call at 2:50 a.m. You drove her to Pueblo with her hands clenched in her lap the whole way and she didn't cry once until you parked outside her mother's house, and then she couldn't stop.

You built the first sensor that summer. A coffee can, a gas sensor off the internet, a radio chip you scavenged from a baby monitor. If this had been on the ridge, you'd told her, he'd have had twenty minutes. She'd looked at it for a long time and said nothing at all.

"Why didn't you ever say anything?" you ask now.

She's quiet through two green lights.

"Because you were happy," Darya says. "First with that girl from your capstone team. Then just happy. You had this way of walking into the lab in the morning like the day owed you something good. I liked that more than I liked the idea of you knowing." She shrugs one shoulder, a small, expensive movement. "And I'm a lot, Ethan. I know I'm a lot. My mother says I love like a fist."

"That's not..."

"It's a little true." She turns onto your street. "It's fine. I've had a long time to get used to it."

"Eight years."

"Eight years in August." She says it the way other people say the weather. Then, after a moment: "I'm not telling you so you'll owe me something. I'm telling you because I'm going to be standing very close to you for a while and I won't do that with a lie in my pocket. You can tell me to go. Nyla will send someone else. Someone good."

"I don't want someone else."

You hear yourself say it. So does she. She doesn't look at you, but the corner of her mouth moves, and for a second she's twenty again, pretending she isn't pleased you finally fixed a joint on your own.

She parks across from your building. A converted brick warehouse on a quiet block in LoHi, four floors, iron stairs on the outside nobody uses. Across the street, a low beige dialysis clinic, dark for the night. She cuts the engine and sits for a second looking at the building like she's reading it.

"May I walk you up?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to go in front of you on the stairs."

"Is that a rule?"

"It's a habit." She opens her door. "Stay behind me."

The lobby is warm and smells like someone's curry. The elevator has been broken since summer, so you take the stairs, Darya first, silent in her boots, you behind her, absurdly aware of the fact that you are watching the shape of her in that coat and should not be. Second floor. Third. On the fourth-floor landing she stops so suddenly you nearly walk into her back.

She puts out one arm. Not touching you. Just there.

Down the hallway, your apartment door is open.

Not wide. Two inches. A slice of your own lamplight lying across the hall carpet like something spilled.

"Did you lock it this morning?" she asks, very quietly.

You think of the deadbolt. The extra turn you always give it because your father taught you to.

"Yes," you say. "I locked it."