Chapter 1 Sidewall
Evelyn's POV
The sun had finally come out over Seacrest, and the whole city was steaming. Evergreen shadow slid across the wet asphalt, and damp settled on the back of my neck like a hand I couldn't shrug off.
Three weeks of gray, and the one clear afternoon I got, I was spending it driving to a restaurant on the water to meet a man I had no interest in meeting.
The dash chimed. Payment cleared. For about two seconds I felt that warm little flicker of relief, right before I did the math.
Fifty-one to go.
Seventy-two payments on this car. I'd counted them out loud once, in the staff lot behind the humanities building, like saying the number would make it shorter. It didn't. The university paid me like it was doing me a favor, my throat was shredded from three lectures and a seminar, and there was a bag of honey lozenges in the console I was rationing.
I was still doing the math when the car sagged under me.
Not hard. Just a slow drop on the right side, like a horse going lame. The wheel went heavy and fought me toward the shoulder, and the dash lit up in a row of orange warnings that meant nothing good.
I got it over. Hazards on. Then I saw the thin curl of white coming out of the hood seam and shut the engine off fast, because I wasn't about to find out what a smoking Civic does next.
The insurance card said forty minutes for a tow. Thursday, midday, on a ramp where nobody was going to slow down for me.
So I called the last person I wanted to call.
"Sorry," I said, because I was. "My car died on the ramp. Northbound, right past the interchange, shoulder of the lane."
He said the landmark back to me like he was writing it down. Then, flat and certain: "Stay put. I'll come to you."
I got out and walked the front of the car.
Heat came up off the pavement through my shoes. I squatted by the right front wheel and saw it before I touched it — a bubble the size of a plum sitting in the sidewall, the rubber stretched pale over whatever was pushing out from underneath.
That's not a tire you patch. That's a tire that decided to give me one more day.
I stood, pulled the trench coat off, folded it over my arm, and waited with my hair sticking to my neck. Waiting is my least favorite thing in the world.
And the strange part — the part I noticed and then put away because I didn't have room for it — was that some small piece of me was relieved.
A Harley came off the entrance and slowed. The rider tipped his head at me, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled — not a friendly one. The kind that arrives before the man does.
I stepped back half a pace toward the car. Not today. Not this.
He pulled over anyway.
Close to six-four, the bike small under him. Old ball cap pulled to his eyebrows, sunglasses covering half his face, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a scar running up the inside of one forearm like somebody had written on him and thought better of it.
He killed the engine. Peeled his gloves off finger by finger, slow, like a man with nowhere to be. Then he came straight at me, close enough that I got a face full of him — motor oil, hot metal, and under all of it something like cold air and pine.
I put a hand up. "This isn't any of your business —"
He didn't stop. Didn't even slow. Walked past me, crouched in front of the wheel, pressed both thumbs into the sidewall.
"Who says it's not?" He didn't look up. "Aren't you waiting on me?"
I blinked at him.
Cap. Shirt with grease worked into the weave. That bike. I did the arithmetic and it came out wrong, and then I did it again, and it came out wrong a second time.
"That was fast," I said. "Four minutes. You're Owen Fr—"
"Sidewall's gone." He straightened, wiped his hands on his thighs, and talked straight over the back half of my sentence like it hadn't been there. "Drive that another mile, it goes off like a gunshot and takes the fender with it. I'm calling a tow."
I stood there with my mouth half open and the name still stuck in it.
Are all lawyers feral now? Is this what a public defender looks like when he's had a bad week?
He turned his back to do it. The address came out of him fast and exact — ramp number, mile marker, direction, right side, hazards on — and he gave them the tire size too.
I called the roadside line back and canceled while he was still talking.
The truck showed up inside fifteen minutes. That told me something.
He handed the driver my keys, said three things I didn't follow, and stepped back. The driver nodded at him the way you nod at somebody who knows more than you do.
I was still standing there with my coat over my arm, feeling like a woman who'd walked into a movie twenty minutes late.
"Thank you," I said. My mother did raise somebody, and I wasn't about to stand on the shoulder of a ramp being rescued for free. "Wherever we're going, it's on me. I'm buying."
He tipped his head at the bike. "Get on. I'll run you over."
I looked at the pillion seat. I looked at the grease.
"I'll take a rideshare."
He didn't argue. Didn't sigh. Didn't push. Just said, "Suit yourself," and hung the helmet back on the handlebar.
That somehow made it worse.
The place on the corner had a hand-lettered menu in a plastic sleeve and a ceiling fan turning slow enough to count the blades. Somebody in the back was frying onions, and after a week of toast my stomach turned over on itself.
The waitress brought two waters before we'd sat down and called him hon, and he nodded at her like she was right.
He took the cap off first, then the glasses, and I finally got a clean look at him. High brow ridge. Dark hair flattened by the hat, a little long at the collar. Black-brown eyes set deep, a nose broken once and set by somebody who didn't care how it looked. Stubble along a hard jaw. He looked at me the way you look at a bill you've already paid.
Then he opened his mouth and the whole face went slack.
I ordered the soup. It was the only thing on the board that didn't need chewing.
He ordered the same. No comment. No joke about it. Just the soup.
Then he leaned back and looked at the window like he'd already forgotten I was there.
Which is exactly when my phone went off on the table, screen up.
Owen.
I looked at it. I looked at the man across from me. Something cold went down the back of my arms, the way it does when you already know the answer and you're just waiting for the words.
I picked it up.
"Past the interchange, northbound shoulder —" Wind in the receiver, a truck going by close. "There's no car here. Hey. Hey. Am I talking to myself? Where. Are. You."
