Promise

Terri stood on the porch, waiting for her long-ago boyfriend Alex, or his wife, Renee, to answer the door. The neighborhood looked a lot like the one they’d all grown up in, about sixty miles west, with rows of identical tract homes, tidy shrubs, and the occasional rusted-out car up on blocks in the driveway.

Footsteps: someone was coming. Did the late-afternoon sun expose the lines in her face, she wondered, or did it light up her eyes? Why do you care, she scolded herself.

Why had she come?

The door swung open, and a little old man, short and wiry, appeared.

No—not an old man. It was Alex.