That earns me a snort, but she doesn’t look convinced.
Traffic crawls. A bus roars past. Someone yells on the sidewalk. A siren wails in the distance, sharp and piercing, and I flinch before I can stop myself.
Hannah notices.
Her grip tightens on the steering wheel. “Do you want me to pull over?”
The idea makes my throat close.
Pulling over means standing outside. Means people. Nowhere to hide.
“No,” I say too quickly, tilting my head back. I try to breathe. “No, I’m fine,” I lie. “Really.”
I’m not fine.
I’m holding myself together with duct tape and bad decisions.
“Just—uh, can you, um—talk to me?” I ask, working hard to keep my voice steady. Like I’m asking for a favor and not oxygen.
She glances over again, this time longer. Assessing. Deciding.
“Okay,” she says finally. “But if you throw up in my car, you’re paying for the detailing.”
“That’s fair,” I agree immediately.
She exhales through her nose, a corner of her mouth twitching despite herself. “God. Men are so dramatic.”
The words shouldn’t help. Neither should the way she rolls her eyes. They do.
The panic loosens its grip just enough for me to breathe a little deeper.
“Talk about…what?” she asks.
“Anything,” I say. “Literally anything.”
She taps her fingers against the steering wheel, thinking. The car inches forward in traffic.
“When I first moved in,” she says finally, “I thought the landlord was going to kick me out.”
“What?” I frown. “Why?”
“Because the other tenants complained about my cat.” She sits up straighter, checks her rearview mirror, changes lanes. “Apparently he would cry, like,reallyloud, when I was at work.”
She glances at me. “He’s kind of clingy.”
I don’t blame him.
That’s what I think, watching how the green in her eyes turns to brown at the edges.
“But then they said he stopped,” she adds with a shrug.
I think of the cat food in my pantry.
“The landlord would never kick you out,” I say.
She gives me a look, curious, skeptical, like she wants to ask how I could possibly be so sure.
Before she does, I cut in.
