I reached for the door.
“Wait,” he said.
I waited.
He got out, came around, and opened my door before I could. I’d seen men do this in movies. No one had ever done it for me.
I stepped down out of the truck. He was close. Closer than the door required. I could see the tattoos on his arms in full daylight now—black ink, dense, running down the right and across part of the left. I didn’t look long enough to read any of them.
He stepped back. “After you.”
I walked in front of him. I felt his eyes on me the whole way to the door, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to stop looking or if I wanted him to never stop.
The diner was about a third full. The man behind the counter looked up when we walked in. He was big—broad shoulders, the kind of arms that stretched the sleeves of his shirt—and he had a face that didn’t change when he saw Ross. He just nodded once.
Ross nodded back.
The man looked at me. Held it a second longer than was casual. Then he went back to the order he was running through on a ticket pad. The only thing that changed about him was that I felt fairly certain he was now tracking us in his peripheral vision.
“Booth okay?” Ross asked me.
“Sure.”
He picked a booth in the back corner. I slid in across from him. He handed me a menu. I opened it without reading it.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Why?”
“You went quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Quieter.”
I set the menu down. “I don’t usually do this.”
“Do what?”
“Get in trucks. Go to diners. Any of this.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He just looked at me across the table with that steady look he had—the one that didn’t ask for an explanation but made me want to give him one anyway.
“I came on this trip with my friend Suri,” I said. “I read on the couch the first three days. I went on a walk this morning because I couldn’t read for a fourth day. That’s the whole story. I’m not a person things happen to.”
“You walked the wrong way,” he said.
“What?”
“This morning. You said you walked the wrong way. That wasn’t nothing.”
“It was a wrong turn.”
“Was it?”
I didn’t answer.
A waitress came up with a coffee pot and a smile that was a little too bright. She glanced at Ross with a quick lift of her eyebrows that meant something betweenwho’s thisandfinally, and then she turned the wattage on me.
