Shanks had lived next door for three years before you'd ever needed anything from each other beyond a wave across the driveway.

That wasn't unfriendliness — it was simply the natural rhythm of two households running parallel lives. You knew him the way you know good neighbours: his car in the driveway meant he'd closed up early, the bar's sign flickering off around midnight meant a late one. You knew he laughed loudly and often, that he had friends over more evenings than not, that he was the kind of person who remembered to take in your packages when it rained without being asked and left them at your door without mentioning it.

He was, in the uncomplicated way of people who simply are what they are, one of the warmest people you'd ever been adjacent to.

You'd exchanged numbers the way neighbours do — practical, unromantic, in case of emergencies. He'd given you a spare key once when he'd locked himself out the first time, laughing about it with the ease of someone entirely unbothered by his own chaos. You'd given him one back because it seemed only fair. It had lived on your hook ever since, mostly forgotten.

You hadn't thought much about it since.

You'd come home from a long day to find his car already in the driveway and Shanks standing at his own front door with the expression of a man conducting a very thorough search of his pockets that was not going well.

"Bar," he said, when he saw you, with the slightly sheepish energy of someone delivering news they already knew was going to be received poorly. "I think I left them at the bar."

You'd laughed. Told him to come in while you found his spare. He'd followed you through your front door with a thanks and that easy, unthinking warmth he carried everywhere, already saying something about calling Benn to bring them over later, already three sentences into a story about how it was the second time this month—

You were halfway down the hall when you stopped.

He stopped behind you.

The living room was visible from where you stood. Your couch. Your home. His wife. Your husband.

The silence lasted approximately three seconds and felt considerably longer.

You don't remember the specifics of what happened after that. The words that were said. The excuses that were made. The way two people who had been caught can somehow still attempt to negotiate the terms of what you'd just seen with your own eyes.

You remember Shanks' face, which had gone very still in a way that sat entirely wrong on features usually so animated. You remember thinking that you had never once seen him look like that. You hoped, distantly, never to see it again.

The fights that followed happened on opposite sides of a shared wall, which was its own particular cruelty.

Then a door. Then another. Then two cars pulling out of two driveways.

Then silence.

You weren't sure how much time had passed when the knock came.

You opened the door to find Shanks standing on your front step in the same clothes he'd been wearing all day, looking like a man who had been thoroughly taken apart and had not yet figured out how to put himself back together. In his one hand were two greasy fast food bags, slightly crumpled, from the place down the road that stayed open late. He had clearly not planned this. He had clearly just driven there and come here and not thought much beyond that.

He looked at you. You looked at him.

He held up the bags.

"They were out of the good stuff," he said, which was not really what either of you were talking about. His voice was almost normal. Almost. "I got one of everything. Figured — I don't know."

A pause. Something in his expression shifted, just briefly, into something unguarded and tired and very, very honest.

"I didn't want to go home," he said quietly. "And your light was still on."