She eats three more bites without saying anything. I sit with my hands in my lap.
"I don't have a phone," I say.
"Your phone was in the house."
"Yes."
"I'll get you a phone."
"When?”
"This week."
"Not tonight?”
"Not tonight. I'd have to drive into the city. I can't tonight."
"Why can't you tonight?”
"Because if I drive into the city and buy a phone at eight at night, a woman who looks like me, at a store that knows me, that's something somebody will remember on Thursday. Thursday is the day they are going to put your face on the news. I don't want anybody remembering me buying a burner phone at eight at night on a Wednesday."
I sit with that.
I sit with the fact that she is not a firefighter who happened to see the fire. Firefighters who happened to see a fire do not think about what a store clerk will remember on Thursday. How does she know they will put my face on the news on Thursday?
I do not say this.
I say, "What if I want to call someone?”
"Who?”
"A friend in London."
"You can."
"From your landline?”
"From my landline."
"You said yesterday calls from this landline go through a switching station."
"I said a lot of things yesterday. I wanted you to know there were options. Yes. A call to London from this landline is a trace if anybody goes looking. A trace for me, and for you if they work at it. If you need to make the call, you make the call. I'd rather you wait until we have an untraceable phone."
"Who iswe?”
She looks up at me.
"Me," she says. "I meant me. Sorry."
"All right."
"Evangeline?”
"Yes."
"If you want to leave," she says, "I'll drive you wherever you want me to drive you. Tonight. Right now. I'll put on my boots and I'll drive you. Say the word."
I sit at the table with my hands in my lap and I look at this woman who has lied to me at least twice in a sentence, and I think about saying the word. I think about it the way I think about picking up a phone. Seriously. Not as an abstraction. I think about what it would mean to put on a coat I don't have and get into a truck with her and have her drive me to a city where my face is about to be on the news, where my dead husband's name is in every paper this morning, where I do not know which of his associates would recognize me in an airport, where I do not know which of Max's people, whoever they are, would find me in a hotel.
