“Diner. Best burgers in town. Also the only burgers in town.”
“Fine.”
He glanced over at me. “You don’t talk a lot.”
“I’m talking.”
“Sometimes.”
I turned my face toward the window so he couldn’t see the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. The river was on his side of the truck, running flat and slow through the trees. On my side, just road and trees and the white line. I watched the white line.
I’d never been the woman in the passenger seat of a man’s truck before. I’d been the woman in the back of a friend’s car. I’d been the woman driving herself. But I’d never been the woman a man went the wrong way for.
It was making it hard to think.
“How long have you been at the cabin?” he asked.
“Few days.”
“How long are you here?”
“Few more.”
He nodded. I watched it out of the corner of my eye. He had the kind of jaw that did something even when he was just nodding.
“What do you do back home?” he asked.
“I’m a freelance editor.”
“What does that mean?”
“I clean up writing for businesses. Websites, marketing copy, content platforms. They send me a mess and I send back something that doesn’t sound like a robot wrote it.”
“You good at it?”
“Yes.”
He glanced at me. “That was fast.”
“I’m good at it.”
The corner of his mouth twitched again.
He drove. The road narrowed and the trees closed in over the top of the truck, forming the green tunnel I’d come up through four days ago in Suri’s sedan, when I’d been a woman on a vacation I hadn’t quite agreed to.
Now I was a woman in a stranger’s truck, and the same trees looked different.
The road opened. The Tudor-style inn and the pancake house appeared on the right, the way I remembered them—long porches, dormer windows, carved wooden signs. Across the street, the low building with the flickering neon ‘EATS’ sign was apparently the diner. I hadn’t known that the first time through. I’d assumed it was closed.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it.”
“It says ‘EATS’.”
“Used to say ‘SODA JERK’ in the other window. Sign broke maybe six years ago. Nobody’s fixed it.”
He pulled the truck into a gravel lot between the diner and the feed store I’d noticed when we drove past on our way into town—the one with the chicken feed sign in the window. He killed the engine.
