The last house sat at the end of a crushed-shell road, tucked behind sea grapes and a low wall of coral rock. The Toronado rolled to a stop under a canopy of strangler fig, engine purring like it knew the game was over and had decided to behave. Kathy killed the ignition, then turned to me with a slow, satisfied smile.

“Take your shoes off when we go in,” she said, voice husky from the heat and everything that had happened under the banyan tree. “Saltillo tile. I don’t want scratches.”

She opened her door and the dome light spilled across her legs. That’s when I really noticed the sandals: thin, cognac-colored leather straps that wrapped around her ankles and crisscrossed up the tops of her feet like they were holding a secret. The kind of heels that weren’t high (maybe two and a half inches), but sharp enough to make her calves flex every time she moved. A tiny gold chain glinted across each toe, catching the last of the sunset.

We walked the path to the house barefoot (she’d slipped the sandals off and left them on the Toronado’s floor mat). But once we were inside and the tour was officially over, Kathy decided we needed to “check the sightlines from the driveway one more time.” She padded back to the car in bare feet, retrieved the sandals, and slid them on right there in the open door, one foot up on the sill so the strap buckled tight around her ankle. The leather was soft, darkened with years of Florida sun, and the soles were worn thin enough that every grain of shell on the ground would make itself known.

She dropped back behind the wheel, skirt riding high again, and looked at me across the wide red vinyl.

“One last test,” she said. “I want to pull all the way down to the dock so you can see how the house sits from the water at dusk.”

She turned the key. The starter whirred, the big V8 caught for half a second, then choked and died (deliberately flooded again). Kathy laughed under her breath, a low, wicked sound.

“Guess she’s jealous after all.”

She began the ritual one more time, but slower now, like she was performing just for me. Right foot pressing the gas pedal in those strappy sandals: down, hold, release, down again. Every time she pushed, the leather straps pulled tight across the top of her foot, the delicate skin wrinkling in fine, sun-kissed lines between the straps. The wrinkles deepened and smoothed, deepened and smoothed, like tide marks on sand. Her toes flexed inside the thin soles, the little gold chains flashing each time the pedal rose.

Pump… pump… pump. The wrinkles danced. The engine coughed, caught, coughed again. She held the pedal halfway down, heel lifted so the sandal hung from her toes for a moment, straps loose, then slammed her foot back to the floor mat. More wrinkles, sharper this time, the leather creaking softly.

I couldn’t look away from her foot working that pedal like it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen (and maybe it was). The Toronado finally roared to life, shaking the whole car, and Kathy let it idle rough and low while she turned to me, green eyes glittering in the dash lights.

“Hold on, sugar,” she whispered.

She dropped it into drive and floored it. The back tires spun shell and sand, and those beautiful wrinkled feet in their worn leather straps never let up until we skidded to a stop at the end of the private dock, water lapping black and gold beneath us.

She cut the engine. Silence rushed in with the night sounds.

Kathy unbuckled, turned to me, and slowly (very slowly) unbuckled the tiny strap around her left ankle, then her right. The sandals fell to the floor mat with a soft thud.

“House comes fully furnished,” she said, voice barely more than breath against my mouth. “But I’m throwing in a private ride, anytime you want it.”

Then she crawled across the wide bench seat, knees sinking into red vinyl, and showed me exactly how well that old Toronado could rock when it wasn’t the only one being flooded tonight.

Kathy didn’t talk about the past unless the moon was right and the bourbon was strong, but that night on the dock, after the third time the Toronado’s bench seat had served purposes General Motors never intended, she finally let the story spill out in pieces between slow kisses and the slap of water against pilings.

She was born in 1974 in Apalachicola, back when the oyster boats still came in painted like carnival rides and the juke joints on Avenue E stayed open until the sheriff got tired. Her daddy ran a Texaco station on the corner of 98 and 13th; her mama sold real estate out of a cinder-block office with a hand-painted sign that read “Kathy Sr. Realty—If I Can’t Sell It, It Ain’t Worth Owning.”

Kathy Jr. grew up under cars, passing tools to her father while he cursed carburetors and married men who didn’t rotate their tires. The Toronado came into her life when she was sixteen. A widow from Eastpoint traded it for a double-wide and two acres of pine scrub because “that damn boat of a car drinks more gas than my late husband drank gin.” Kathy’s father planned to flip it, but the first time she fired up that 425 Rocket and felt seven thousand pounds of American iron lunge forward, she knew she’d steal it if she had to. Instead she worked double shifts at the Dairy Queen on the circle, saved every tip in a Folgers can, and bought it outright on her eighteenth birthday.

She married at twenty-one (too young, everyone said) to a good-looking shrimper named Travis who swore he’d take her out of Apalachicola and never bring her back. They moved to Tampa, then St. Pete Beach, then Clearwater when the money got better. Travis bought a bigger boat; Kathy got her real estate license and discovered she could talk a retiree from Ohio into a half-million-dollar canal home before lunch. For eight years they looked like the postcard: bronzed couple, his-and-hers convertibles, Christmas cards with palm trees and matching swimsuits.

Then came 2008. Travis’s boat got repossessed the same week the market ate her commissions alive. He started running nights (something quieter than shrimp, something that paid in cash and didn’t ask questions). One dawn in 2011 the Coast Guard knocked on her door with a Ziploc bag containing his wedding ring and a single New Balance sneaker. No body. Just paperwork.

Kathy kept the Toronado and nothing else. Sold the condo, the jewelry, the Chris-Craft he loved more than her. Drove east until the road ran out of land and she was back in the Panhandle, thirty-seven years old with a ten-year-old real estate license and a car that still smelled faintly of his Marlboros.

She rebuilt herself the way her father taught her: one part at a time. Took the shittiest listings nobody wanted (probates, sinkhole specials, houses where someone had died messy). Learned to smile while power-washing blood off terrazzo, to flirt just enough to keep a seller from noticing she’d knocked twenty grand off the price. By 2016 she was the closer every brokerage called when a listing had been on the market six months and smelled like defeat.

The Toronado never left her. She babied it the way other women baby rescue dogs (new carpets, rebuilt Quadrajet, period-correct Toronado floor mats ordered from a guy in Michigan who only answered the phone on Tuesdays). People joked that the car was her real husband now. She never corrected them.

Some nights, when the market was slow and the ghosts got loud, she’d drive out to the St. George Island bridge, stop in the middle where the water was black on both sides, and let the engine flood on purpose. Sit there in the dark, pumping the pedal until her calf burned and the wrinkles in her foot ached against those old leather straps, waiting for the big V8 to catch the way her life never quite had.

Then one July afternoon a guy from Chicago walked into her office asking about waterfront houses with a pool, and the Toronado started right up for the first time in weeks.

Kathy leaned back against the Toronado’s fender now, barefoot again, the gold chains on her sandals catching the dock lights. She lit a cigarette she didn’t intend to finish and looked out at the dark water.

“Funny thing about flooding,” she said, exhaling smoke toward the stars. “Sometimes an engine just needs to drown a little before it remembers how to breathe.”

She flicked the cigarette into the canal, turned to me, and smiled the first real smile I’d seen on her all day.

“Come on, sugar. Let’s go write an offer. This house isn’t gonna sell itself.”

And for the first time in years, the Toronado started on the very first try when we left.