"What can I get y’all?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Jace ordered for both of us. Fried grouper, sweet iced tea, hush puppies. Sara wrote it down without looking up.
Then she suddenly noticed. Her eyes went from Jace to me and back to Jace. Something shifted in her face.
"I know who you are," she said quietly, setting her notepad down. "You’re the man whose lawyers called our lawyer last week."
Jace nodded. "We’re here to see Diane. If she’s willing."
Sara looked at us for a long moment.
"She’s in the back," she said. "She doesn’t come out front much. The chair doesn’t fit between the tables well." She paused. "Give me a minute."
She disappeared through a door behind the counter. The little boylooked up from his crayons and waved at us with a blue crayon still in his fist. I waved back and smiled.
Sara came back pushing a wheelchair. The woman in it was Diane. She looked smaller than I expected. Mid-thirties, dark hair pulled back, her face tanned and lined by sun and pain in equal measure. Her legs were covered by a light blanket.
"Mommy!" The little boy leaped.
"Marcus, what did I tell you about running?" she told her son.
Marcus climbed into her lap. She held him and kissed the top of his head and looked at me over his hair.
"So you're Anna," she said, her voice warm and unhurried, with a soft Southern pull on the vowels.
"I’m Anna."
She smiled. "Sit. I heard you wanted to talk about Tobias."
Sara brought more tea. I drank while Jace politely refused.
Jace moved to the next table to give Diane and me some space. Marcus followed, showing him a drawing of a fish he'd been coloring. Orange and blue with an enormous tail. Jace held it up at arm's length and studied it. His head tilted. His brow furrowed. He rotated it a few degrees. He was taking this fish very seriously.
"The proportions are excellent," I heard him say. "The tail is slightly oversized relative to the body, but artistically I think it works. It creates a sense of movement."
Marcus beamed, grabbed the drawing back, and ran to Sara to start another one.
Diane watched them, then she looked at me. "He's always like that?"
"Yes. Always."
She laughed softly, watching her son. Then the laughter faded, and so did everything behind it.
She told me about the accident. The ambulance. Waking up in a hospital room with a lawyer already standing at the foot of the bed, papers laid out on the blanket, a pen pressed into her hand before the anesthesia had fully worn off.
"I didn’t know what I was signing," she said. "They told me it was standard. Medical release forms. I was on morphine and my leg was in three pieces and the man in the suit kept saying sign here, sign here." She looked down at her hands. "I found out what I’d actually signed a month later when I tried to take it to court."
Sara pulled up a chair. Her face was harder than Diane's, her jaw set tight.
"I'm the one who fought it." Her voice was clipped, angry. "Diane was still in surgery. I hired a lawyer with money we didn't have. Filed complaints. Made calls." She didn't blink. "Tobias's people buried everything. They had more lawyers than we had savings."
She looked at Marcus, who was showing Jace a second fish, this one with a purple tail. "They called me at two in the morning. Every night for three weeks. Blocked numbers. Never said anything threatening. Just called. Let the phone ring. Hung up. Called again."
"Sara," Diane said gently.
"Three weeks." Sara’s voice thinned with the memory. "I stopped sleeping. Started having panic attacks. Lost my job. Couldn’t take care of Marcus anymore."
"We came here," Diane said. "Grandma’s house. It was falling apart but it was ours. Sara got the café running. I handle thebooks. Marcus thinks this is just where we live." She looked at the boy. "He doesn’t know why."
