Chapter 2: An Unexpected Night

Harper's POV

The loan. Of course Dolores had come around to the loan.

She had been against my taking it out to open the shop from the very start, and her reason had only ever been the one: every dollar that went to the bank each month had to come out of the money I gave her to live on. Three divorces, and she had never learned a trade that would earn her a thing. Apart from me, she had nothing in this world to lean on.

And I had finally, after all of it, got myself engaged this one time. So she had invited most of the ladies from the church auxiliary — because as long as those women were sitting out there watching, not one of them could start whispering behind her back about how a woman with three divorces behind her would naturally raise a daughter who couldn't keep a man either.

She was not going to let me cancel this engagement.

I wanted to shout at her, to lay every thing that had happened in that last hour out in front of her, word by word. But I looked up and caught the pleading in her eyes, saw the hair she'd had done specially for today, saw her carefully painted lips trembling, and not one word would come out of me. In the end I set the microphone back down on the table and said nothing at all.

Liam came out of the inner hall with his clothes changed, unhurried, the way a man walks back in from taking a phone call. He came to my side, laid an arm loosely against the small of my back, and turned a clean smile on the room. "Sorry about that — little misunderstanding, folks. Go on, our party continues."

The music started up again. Somebody raised the first glass, and the eyes in that room slowly loosened off me.

He leaned in to my ear, his voice flattened out like a man reading off a memo. "Three people from Vance are here. My supervisor's sitting at the third table. I talk about my promotion next week. Tonight does not get shut down."

I didn't move.

"You're an adult," he went on. "You know what to do."

You're an adult, you know what to do. It came off his tongue so smoothly, as though my anger were only an emotion that needed managing, as though his betraying me had been, from the very beginning, a problem with my feelings and not a problem with what he did.

I straightened my back, turned my head, and said it at a volume he could hear and no one else could. "At our engagement party, behind my back, you slept with my best friend. And now you're standing here telling me that for the sake of your promotion I have to sit through this party to the end?"

"The two things don't conflict."

"They don't conflict for you."

His eyelid twitched once. Then he put the smile back on and walked off toward the third table.

Blair came out with a different dress on, her face soft as though nothing whatever had happened. She carried her glass over to where I stood — three or four people happened to be talking nearby — and tuned her voice back to that familiar warmth. "Harper, don't blame Liam. It really was me. If you need to be angry, be angry at me."

I looked at her.

She lowered her eyes a little and added, "And besides... if you really did cancel the engagement party just like that, that wouldn't do your name any good out there either, would it."

I heard every single word. Here she was, worrying on my behalf about my reputation once the party was cancelled — not about one thing she had done herself. She had taken what happened behind that door and covered it over for me, and now I was the one who needed reminding to mind her manners.

"Are you worrying about me," I said, "or are you inventing a rumor about me?"

Her face froze for half a second. Around us, heads were beginning to turn.

The words were barely out of my mouth when Liam arrived, his voice a notch harder than before. "What is it you want? Does every last person in this room have to lose face?"

Blair stayed two steps back, didn't come any closer, and said it lightly. "Harper's been like this since she was little. One thing goes wrong and she wants to flip the table over."

Out beyond the crowd Dolores was watching too, shaking her head slowly, and beside her stood Mrs. Miller, whose good opinion she cared about.

Three people. Three directions. My mother pressed me with my living, Liam blocked me with my future, Blair indicted me with my character. This was not three people who happened to be disappointed in me at the same time. I was jammed in the middle of them, and whichever way I turned, somebody had to be given room.

I looked at my mother. "I'm the only one paying that loan. He won't pay it for me, and neither will you."

I turned to Liam. "You're the one who did the disgusting thing. Not me."

I looked at Blair last. "All this time, and you finally said what you actually think."

Then I walked to the table with the white cloth and took the ring off my left hand and set it down beside the cake, right between the two names.

Seeing the panic on both their faces, I curled my mouth up, picked up the cake, and threw it hard into Liam's face, and watching the cream run down from his eyebrows, watching him open his mouth and no sound come out, I could finally laugh, and I laughed.

Then I picked up the microphone one more time.

"My engagement party is cancelled," I said. "Though if the rest of you would like to keep going, you can ask Liam whether he'd care to get engaged to Blair right here tonight — the two of them were plenty warm in the dressing room a minute ago."

I walked the length of the hall and went out the front door. Behind me the music didn't stop. Nobody came after me.

Outside the air was wet and stayed on the skin, and the fine bright feeling I'd walked out with leaked away minute by minute until there was nothing left in me but a dull irritation, and damn this weather anyway. I got into the car and pushed the key at the ignition; my hand shook and it wouldn't go in, and the second try it went.

The phone lit up. Bud Carver.

I answered.

"Ms. Hayes." His voice was all business, the way a man talks when he's leaving a voicemail. "Slight change of circumstances on my end. Since we can't come to terms on the zoning, I've decided I won't be renewing once the lease runs out. Please have the space cleared within two weeks and return the keys to the property office."

"Bud," I said, "Article Fourteen of the lease—"

"Due process has already been followed." He cut me off. "Good night."

The line went dead.

I set the phone face down on the steering wheel and stared at the windshield for about five seconds. Then I turned the car around and drove toward the shop.

The rain didn't start until I was on the road. Past the bridge, Route 17 turned into a run of hard curves with thick water oaks packed in on both sides and a streetlight every two hundred feet, and it came down loud on the roof, the wipers going back and forth, every pass wiping the road ahead into a blur and then back into focus.

I laid the sentences out in my head again, over and over. Article Fourteen. The right to a hearing. The fact that he had never once sat down with me for a formal negotiation. This was not a lease running out — this was a forced eviction. I could say all of it clearly, I had to say all of it clearly — if I could only get the words out clearly, he would have to give me a hearing.

But the whole set of them turned over in my head, turned over, and by the fourth pass they came apart. Came apart into Bud walking off with the contract under his arm. Came apart into that seam of light at the dressing room door. Came apart into sixty faces turning to look at me at once. I pushed the accelerator down, the car picked up speed on the wet road, and I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand, and my sight stayed blurred.

By the time I made out a person at the side of the road, he was less than ten feet from my front end.

I put the brake to the floor. The tires made a sound in the standing water like cloth tearing, the front end didn't stop, it slid sideways half a meter, and the right front corner caught him.

He went down sideways onto the gravel of the shoulder. It was a very light sound, and it dropped a big hole straight through the middle of me.

In that moment my heart stopped with the man on the ground, and my head filled up with one piece of information: I have hit someone.