Page 4 of Open Road

Stops.

For one hopeful second it stays there, then it turns around.

My hand goes to the door handle, my heart doing something loud and unhelpful behind my ribs as the headlight swings back toward me, steady and unhurried. It pulls in behind my car, the engine idles, then silence.

When he swings off the bike, the first thing I notice is his size. He’s big. The kind of guy that makes you instinctively calculate your chances of outrunning him and immediately coming up short.

The second thing is his cut,

visible even in the dark, the kind with patches on the back that I’ve learned to read since Craig started talking about his business associates.

My hand tightens on the door handle.

He stops about ten feet away. Not close. He is deliberate about it, keeping his distance the way you do when you understand that your size is a threat whether you intend it or not. His hands are held slightly away from his body.

“Car trouble?” His voice is low. Florida flat. It’s not the particular flatness of a man trying to sound easy, but the real kind, the kind that doesn’t need to perform anything because it already knows what it is.

“I’m fine,” I say.Force of habit.Craig trained that response into me so thoroughly that I say it before I finish assessing whether it’s true.

The man looks at the car. Looks at the position of it on the shoulder—hazards still going, hood slightly misaligned from when I closed it in a hurry—then he looks back at me.

He doesn’t argue.

That surprises me.

Most men argue with ‘I’m fine’when the evidence is standing right in front of them. He stands there in the dark with his hands now loose at his sides, and I realize I can see him better now that my eyes have adjusted—silver hair, close beard, a face that has some years on it, not young or trying to be. He looks at me the way people look at problems they’re deciding whether to take on.

“I can look at the engine,” he says. “If you want.”

The orange light pulses between us.

I look at him. He looks at me. I am aware of my hair, the way I let it fall forward on the left side tonight, the way I have been letting it fall forward for eight months now—old habits.

The click of a car door handle spins me around.

Rose’s door. Already moving around the back of the car, reaching the passenger side in time to see her hit the asphalt at a run with Mr. Rabbit dragging from one fist, her hair a disaster of sleep tangles. Thirty-one pounds of pure unfiltered momentum, and she has already identified the motorcycle. I reach for her and miss by six inches.

“Is that your bike?” She stops two feet from the man, craning her neck back to look up at him. “It’s big.”

“Rose.”

“It is,” he says to her directly, not over her head to me. Then he crouches down. The man goes from enormous to eye level with my daughter in one smooth movement, forearms resting on his knees. “You want to see it?”

Rose looks back at me with an expression that says the answer is obviously yes, and she cannot believe I need to be consulted on this.

I look at him crouched there in the dark. The way he waited. The way he asked her before he asked me, because she had asked first.

“Okay,” I say. I hear how cautious it sounds, and I mean it to.

He stands, glances at me once, a look that isn’t asking for anything, only checking, then takes Rose the three steps to the bike. She immediately puts both hands on the tank. He lets her. Doesn’t hover or redirect. He crouches down again so he can see what she’s seeing and answers whatever she asks, which is everything, because Rose has never met a question she didn’t ask.

Standing at the car door, I watch them and feel something strange happening in my chest. Not attraction, but something quieter than that. The specific ache of watching someone treat your child as if she’s worth their full attention when you’ve spent two years watching the opposite.

I shut the feeling down.

I’m good at that.

He straightens up and looks at me across the hood of the car. The dog tags at his throat catch the hazard light when he moves.