The diner off Route 6 has that specific chrome-and-red-vinyl look that could be 1962 or could be a themed renovation from three years ago, and I can't tell which, and it doesn't matter, and I hate that some part of me is still cataloguing details like I'll need them for a design brief later.

There's a booth by the window. Second one from the door.

I take it without thinking, slide in facing the entrance, and it's only after I'm sitting there with the vinyl cold through my jeans that I realize what I've done — four years of taking the seat that watches the room because Trevor liked his back to the wall and somebody had to mind the door, and here I am doing it again for a different man entirely, except this time nobody told me to.

Dominic slides in across from me. Doesn't say anything about the seating. Just angles himself so he can see the door past my shoulder too, which means we're both watching it, which means neither of us is actually watching each other, which feels like the truest thing about this whole morning.

"You didn't have to let me have it," I say.

"I didn't let you do anything." He unfolds a paper napkin, sets it on his knee like there's a maître d' somewhere grading him. "You wanted it. I wanted it. There's a version of us where we fight about who sits where. This isn't that version."

"What version is this."

"The one where we've got twelve hours and a road atlas and I'd like to eat a plate of eggs like a person who isn't leaving the country."

The waitress comes over with a pencil behind her ear and a coffee pot already tipping before she's asked, and I understand, watching her pour, that this is a rehearsal. Not for her. For us. For the version of this exact scene we're going to have to run a hundred more times in a hundred more diners under names that aren't ours, and if I can't manage it here, with my own face still on my own driver's license folded into my coat, I sure as hell won't manage it in Vermont.

"Two coffees," Dominic says. "Eggs, over easy, for me. Home fries. She'll have the same, wheat toast."

I would've ordered rye. I don't correct him. That's the whole exercise, I realize — letting a man speak for you convincingly enough that a stranger with a pencil doesn't clock the half-second delay before you nod along.

"You two headed up 91?" the waitress asks, friendly, filling space the way waitresses do.

"Visiting his cousins," I say, too fast, and feel Dominic's foot find mine under the table, a small correcting pressure.

"My cousins," he says smoothly, like I said it right, like there was never a stumble. "In Burlington. Haven't seen them since Christmas before last."

"Long drive for a Sunday."

"We like the scenery," I say, and manage it flat this time, ordinary, a woman who has said this sentence before and will say it again and doesn't feel her own pulse ticking in the stitched-shut cut on her palm.

The waitress moves off. Dominic doesn't look at me right away. He looks at the door.

---

The eggs come. The home fries come, glistening with a little too much oil, the kind of diner grease that used to be the only thing I could afford some months, back when forty dollars in a checking account was a crisis and not a punchline I made in a garage yesterday.

I am starving. That's the strange part. I haven't eaten anything real since the airport cashews, since before that even, and my stomach has been making a specific hollow noise all morning that I've been ignoring by drinking coffee, and now there's a plate of actual food in front of me and I cannot make my hand bring the fork to my mouth.

I cut the eggs into smaller pieces instead. Then smaller. The yolk breaks and runs yellow across the plate and I push a home fry through it, corner it, cut it in half, cut the half in half, and somewhere in the third round of cutting I catch myself — really catch myself, the way you catch your own reflection unexpectedly in a dark window — and recognize exactly what I'm doing.

I used to do this at Trevor's table. Not eating. Managing food into pieces small enough that eating them wouldn't register as eating, because if I ate too fast he'd comment on it, and if I ate too slow he'd comment on that too, and the only safe speed was the speed of pretending to eat while actually just rearranging a plate for forty minutes.

I put the fork down. Flat, tines toward the window, deliberate.

"Eat," Dominic says, not looking up from his own plate, which he is actually eating, methodically, like a man refueling a car.

"I'm not hungry."

"You haven't eaten since the cashews." He doesn't say it like an accusation. He says it like he's been keeping a private ledger of my meals the way he keeps a ledger of everything else, which he probably has. "You'll need it. Long drive."

"I know."

"Then eat."

I pick the fork back up. I eat exactly four bites — real bites, the fork all the way to my mouth, actual swallowing — because he watches until I do it, and then he goes back to his own plate like the negotiation is closed, and something about being handled that plainly, that unashamedly, loosens something in my chest that's been wound tight since the garage.

Nobody has ever told me to eat like it was just a fact and not a test.

---

"Say it again," he says, low, between bites. "Where we met."

"A wine bar in Montreal. You were meeting a friend, I was there with mine, we started talking at the bar because the bartender was slow."

"Which bar."

"You didn't say the name yet."

"Good. Neither did I." A small approving nod, the kind he'd give a column of numbers that finally balanced. "What do I do."

"Import-export. Something boring enough that people stop asking after the second question."

"What do you do."

"I paint. Small stuff. Market stalls." I hesitate. "Should it be closer to true?"

"Closer to true is easier to hold onto under pressure." He wipes his mouth, folds the napkin precisely in quarters. "Lies with nothing true in them fall apart the second somebody asks a follow-up. Lies built over something real just bend."

"So I paint."

"So you paint." He looks at me for the first time since the eggs arrived, actually looks, not scanning the room around my head. "That part doesn't have to be a lie at all."

I don't know what to do with that, so I eat another bite of home fries, and this time I don't have to be told.

---

The bell over the door goes off loud, brass, and a man comes in already talking before the door's shut behind him — big voice, Patriots jacket zipped halfway over a gut that's been growing since before this decade started, face flushed the particular red of a Sunday morning drink that started as a Saturday night one.

He clocks Dominic from four booths away. I watch it happen in real time, watch the recognition land on his face like a slot machine coming up cherries, and my stomach does the elevator-drop thing, the cable-cut thing, and I know before he opens his mouth again exactly what's about to happen.

"No way," he says, loud enough that three tables turn. "No way, that's — Russo?"

Dominic doesn't look up right away. Cuts another bite of egg, brings it to his mouth, chews, swallows. Only then does he lift his head, calm as a man checking the time.

"You've got the wrong table," he says.

"Bullshit I do." The man's already crossing the diner, weaving a little, hand out like he's going to clap Dominic on the shoulder before he thinks better of it a foot away. "Dean Rossetti, Local 251, I sat across from you at three sanitation meetings, you don't forget a face like yours." He laughs, too loud, a laugh with an edge under it that isn't really about anything funny. "Heard the news. Whole neighborhood heard the news. Rocco took your button, that right? Papa's dead and the kid don't even get the chair?"

The diner has gone quiet in that specific way a room goes quiet when it realizes it's listening to something it shouldn't be. I hear the waitress's pencil stop scratching somewhere behind the counter. I hear a fork set down two booths over.

"You're confusing me with somebody," Dominic says, and his voice doesn't rise a single register, doesn't so much as change speed, "and I'd sit back down if I were you."

"I'm not confusing nothing." Dean Rossetti's grin is loose, ugly, delighted with itself the way a drunk man's grin gets when he thinks he's found a story to tell for a month. "Whole thing's a joke, you ask me. Twenty years in that family and Rocco's boys break the guy's girl's fingers at Dean Street like it's nothing — "

"Sit down." Four words. Level as a table saw. "Or walk out. Either one's fine. You won't get a third option."

Something in the flatness of it does what shouting never would have. Dean Rossetti's grin falters at the edges. He looks at Dominic's hands — still, resting either side of his plate, nothing threatening about them at all, and that's exactly what does it, I think, the fact that there's no fist, no rising, nothing to push back against, just four sentences and a silence with teeth in it.

He backs up a step. Laughs again, thinner this time, covering the retreat with noise. "Yeah. Yeah, no, my mistake, pal." He's already turning. "Small world, huh."

He goes back to his booth. But two tables over, a woman in a cardigan has her phone tilted just slightly wrong, screen catching the window light, and I clock it before she lowers it — she wasn't checking a text. Two booths past her, a teenager doesn't even bother hiding it, holds his phone flat on the table, thumb already moving.

The room has a name now. Two faces have been recorded holding it.

---

"We need to go," I say, quiet, not moving my mouth much.

"Not yet." Dominic's voice hasn't changed, but his eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, doing math I can't see the numbers of. "If we bolt right now, that's a story too. Man overhears his name, panics, runs. That's worse than the name."

"So we just sit here."

"We finish the coffee. We look bored." He says it like an instruction to himself as much as to me, and picks his mug up, and I watch him drink like a man with nowhere he needs to be, and I try to do the same, and my hand shakes just enough on the cup that coffee slops over the rim onto my thumb, hot, and I don't flinch, because flinching is its own kind of tell.

I watch the waitress instead. She's stepped away from the register, leaned toward the pass-through window into the kitchen, saying something to somebody I can't see — the cook, maybe, or somebody on a phone, I can't tell which, and every trained instinct in me, the one my father built counting exits in a bar, the one four years with Trevor sharpened into something closer to radar, lights up at once, before I've got a single reason I could say out loud.

"She's talking to someone," I say.

Dominic's eyes flick to the pass-through, back to me, back to the door. "Might be nothing."

"Might not be."

He sets his mug down with the deliberate care of a man closing a book he isn't finished with. "Ten days since Dean Street," he says, low, almost to himself. "Four since Florida. This is exactly how a man gets found — not a raid, not a tip. A guy in a Patriots jacket with a mouth on him and two phones in a diner." He looks at me. "We're not waiting for tomorrow. We leave for Montreal tonight."

"Tonight."

"Tonight." He's already reaching for his wallet. "The border crossing my guy likes runs a bored shift Tuesday, but I'd rather cross on a bored anything than wait another twenty-four hours in a state where my name just got said out loud in a diner."

I nod. My mouth has gone dry in that specific way that makes swallowing audible, so I don't try to speak again right away.

"Bathroom," I say instead, standing, needing a minute that isn't at this table.

"Go."

---

The corridor to the restrooms runs along the back of the building, a window at the end of it looking out over the side lot where the deliveries come in, chain-link and a dumpster and, past that, the main lot where we parked.

I don't need to use the bathroom. I need thirty seconds where nobody can watch my face do whatever it's about to do.

I get maybe ten of those seconds before I look out the window and go still.

There's a grey sedan out there. Rental, unmistakably — that particular shade of no-color grey that only exists on fleet vehicles, a barcode sticker ghost still visible on the windshield where someone scraped it off in a hurry — and it's parked nose-out, which nobody does in an empty lot with all this space, nose-out being the one parking choice that only makes sense if you're planning to leave fast.

Beside it, a man is doing calf stretches against the bumper, one foot braced, weight rocking forward and back, easy and unhurried, like he's got all the time in the world. He checks something on his wrist between reps. Not a phone. A watch, the kind that counts things.

I don't need to see his face to know whose it is. I've spent four years learning the specific geometry of that stretch, that patience, that watch-check — a man performing calm the way other men perform threat, because for him calm is the threat.

I go back to the table. My hands are steady by the time I get there, which surprises me more than it should; it's my voice that gives me away, coming out thinner than I mean it to.

"Quarter-zip," I say, not looking up, sliding back into the booth. "Khakis. Stretching by a grey rental. Parked nose-out."

Dominic's face doesn't move, but something behind it does, a door closing somewhere. "Alone?"

"Yes."

He doesn't ask anything else. He's already got cash out — too much, folded twice, laid under the coffee mug — and he's standing, shrugging his coat on in one motion, and for the first time all meal he takes the seat side that faces the door, angling his body between me and the entrance without a word about it, so I can get my own coat on with one good hand and one splinted, useless, tape-and-paint-stirrer hand fumbling at the sleeve.

He doesn't rush me. That's the thing I notice even now, even with my pulse going like something trying to get out — he waits, patient, watching the glass door instead of watching me struggle, giving me exactly as much time as I need and not one second more.

"Ready," I say.

We leave the plates behind. Mine's barely touched — four bites, cut into a dozen pieces, congealing yellow and grease-shined under the diner's fluorescent light, the way it's been sitting the whole meal, a plate that says, to anyone who bothers to look, this woman could not eat.

Nobody's looking. Everyone in that diner is looking at their phones, or at each other, or at the space where a man just said a name out loud that half of them will repeat by dinner.

The bell over the door rings behind us, brass and thin, and the cold outside hits like a hand.

Our car is where we left it, second row, nose-in the ordinary way people park who aren't planning an exit. I look for the grey sedan out of habit — the spot it was in, nose-out, the man stretching against the bumper — and it isn't there.

It's ten feet behind our own car instead. Engine running, exhaust ghosting up pale in the cold. Driver's door standing wide open.

Nobody in it.