Chapter 2 The Wrong Man

Evelyn's POV

"I'm here," I said. "The car got towed."

Wind hit the receiver first, then a semi went by close enough to swallow whatever he said next.

"Towed," he came back. "Towed where. By who."

"By a truck. Somebody called it in."

"Somebody." He chewed on the word. "I'm standing on a shoulder. There's a hubcap out here and a raccoon situation. That's my afternoon."

I turned my shoulder to the room and hunched over the table. "I'm sorry. Yes. Sorry."

"Sorry doesn't hand me back my afternoon." A car door, maybe. Then, clipped: "Where are you."

I gave him the corner, the cross street, the name of the place, spelled it twice. I gave him the order it happened in — the sag, the shoulder, the smoke, the truck. He made me go back over the smoke. Then fifteen minutes, and a remark about his gas that I let land without a word back.

I set the phone down face-up.

The anger I'd been carrying around all hour found the door at the same moment.

"You're not Owen," I said.

He finished the bite in his mouth before he answered. "No."

"Then why the hell didn't you say so?" I kept it under the ceiling fan, because of the waitress, but it came out hot. "I stood on a highway and called you another man's name. You let me buy you lunch. Was that funny to you?"

He set the spoon down and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, taking his time in a way that told me he knew he had all of it. "I was passing. You had a tire split down to the cords and a coat over your arm. I called you a tow. Then you said the meal was on you."

He turned his water glass a quarter turn. "Where in there did I say I was Owen?"

I opened my mouth.

The trouble was that I went looking and couldn't find it. Four minutes, I'd said. Aren't you waiting on me, he'd said. Bike, grease, cap pulled down to the eyebrows — I'd built the man out of spare parts, handed him a name, and he'd simply accepted it without a word.

There is a kind of anger that has nowhere to sit. It doesn't leave. It burns in the middle of your chest and gives you nothing back.

I got the bag off the back of the chair.

"I helped you," he said, to the soup. "You can't sit through one meal?"

I stood there with the strap in my fist and two rules at war in my head — get out of this diner before you say something you actually mean, and never walk out on a table you offered to pay for.

So I sat down. I put the bag on my lap and wound the strap around my wrist, so that anybody watching would understand I was only visiting the chair.

"Thank you," I said, sweet as a lemon.

"Don't mention it."

The soup came. That's the humiliating part of this story, if you want it: all that fury, and then the food arrived and I was so hungry I had to let the anger wait its turn.

Now I was sitting in it with the wrong man. The fan turned. I counted exits.

Then the bell over the door went, and my stomach dropped, and I felt bad about the drop, which is a stupid thing to feel about a stranger.

He was short and wide through the middle, balding on top with the rest of it pasted down sideways, and he kept shoving his glasses up onto his forehead and dragging them back down again as though he couldn't decide which way he saw better.

I started to raise my hand.

"— half a day gone. Half a day of billables, and for what." He said it to the ceiling fan, to the menu board, to nobody. "Gas, toll, parking. I'm an attorney. I don't eat a loss, I itemize. Firm to that ramp, forty minutes each way, at my rate —"

My hand stopped at the height of the salt shaker and hung there.

Across the table, the man with the soup had gone quiet in a way that got my attention. His eyes moved door, me, door, once, twice, and something crossed his face.

Then he sat up. "Hey," he called, easy as a fence line. "You looking for somebody?"

I jumped so hard my knee cracked into the table leg and the water sloshed over the rim. I shot him a hard look. He didn't blink.

Owen came over with his phone already out, thumb hovering. "Evelyn Hayes. I'm supposed to be meeting an Evelyn Hayes."

He dragged his glasses down and swept the room like he expected her under a chair. "That goddamn woman. Late first, then feeds me some bullshit about her car breaking down on a ramp. When I find her, she's going to learn what a lawyer's professional courtesy actually looks like."

"Rough afternoon," the man said.

"You have no idea. Half a day I could have billed." The notes app was open now, and I watched his thumb find my name in the list, and then I watched him switch to the keypad, and every hair on my arms stood up at once.

I put my hand over the phone and slid it under my thigh.

"She went outside," the man said.

Owen's thumb stopped. "What?"

"Woman at this table, ten, twelve minutes ago." He gestured with his chin, bored, the way you'd point out a fire hydrant. "Took a call, got up fast, said she'd wait out front. Seemed like she was meeting somebody."

Owen's eyes came off the door and dropped onto me and stayed there.

"Did you see her?"

I froze. For two seconds I couldn't find a single word in my own language.

"She's with me," the man said.

Owen's glasses went up onto his head. "Sorry?"

"That's my girlfriend."

"Oh," I said. "Yes. I'm — yes."

I have thought about that moment more than I'd care to admit. One word, four letters, and it came out crooked.

Owen looked between us one last time, decided we weren't worth another minute of his afternoon, and started complaining again on his way out — about wasted trips, about paperwork, about whether anybody in this town ever answered a phone — and the bell went off behind him. Through the glass I watched him check his watch, look left, look right, and stump off around the corner with his shoulders up around his ears.

I let go of a breath I'd been holding since the tow truck pulled away. My hand ached from the strap of my bag.

He pushed the bowl aside and laid the spoon on the saucer. "So what's the deal with you two?"

"None of your business."

He'd helped me — fine, he'd be thanked for it, and not one thing past that. I was finished being handled by men who treated a straight answer as a favor they might do me.

"Thank you for the tow," I said, and stood, and got the bag up onto my shoulder, and made it three steps toward the door.

"Evelyn," he said.

I stopped with my palm already flat against the glass.