The basement smelled like old concrete, faint laundry detergent, and the distant echo of laughter filtering down from the dining room upstairs. Thanksgiving dinner was in full swing—plates clinking, wine pouring, Silver’s friends and their kids trading stories about football and Black Friday plans. Up there, everything was warm lights, golden turkey, polite chaos.Down here, it was different.Davis had only moved in next door three weeks ago. Single, thirty-five, quiet but not shy. He’d helped Silver carry groceries twice, fixed her leaky faucet once without being asked, and caught her eye more than once across the fence when she was watering plants in yoga pants that left nothing to imagination. She was thirty-two, divorced two years, raising eight-year-old Maya alone, and hadn’t been properly fucked since the ink dried on the papers.Tonight she’d invited him over “just to be neighborly.” He’d shown up with a bottle of bourbon and eyes that lingered on the way her cranberry-red wrap
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