Page 9 of My Broken Biker

She walks with her arms easy at her sides and her face carrying whatever it carries, which is always visible on her, and I notice I've been watching her face more than the path.

Near the midpoint of the loop the gravel washes out on one side where a root has pushed up through the ground, creating a dip that doesn't announce itself.

I catch it too late, my footing shifts, and my hand finds her elbow before any thought gets involved, the instinct that finds solid things moving faster than I can direct it.

She doesn't flinch, just steadies, her arm warm and substantial under my hand, and I right myself quickly enough.

I don't let go for an extra half-second after I don't need to anymore.

It isn't planned. It's just there, and then it's over, and I take my hand back, and we both keep walking and neither of us says anything about it.

But the air between us is different after, in the specific way air changes when something has occurred in it that both people registered and neither acknowledged, and we walk the rest of the path in that changed air without speaking much.

At the entrance she stops and turns to look back down the path the way we came, the oaks going to deeper shadow now, the amber light only catching the highest branches.

"You're the most interesting person I've met here," she says, to the trees rather than to me.

I let the silence go for a moment before I answer, because I don't have an immediate answer and I'm not going to pretend I do.

"Bloomfield has a lot of interesting people," I say.

She looks at me then. "I've met most of them," she says. "You're still it."

Level and unhurried, not making anything of it. Just saying it the way it is.

I look back at her and the park sits around us and the late afternoon does what it does, and the moment holds itself for as long as it holds itself, and then she says she has to get Angela.

I watch her walk across the lot to her car without examining why I'm still watching, and I'm still looking at the empty parking space after she's gone.

The drive home is the direct route. I park and I don't immediately get out.

The hands stay on the wheel. The engine ticks as it cools.

Down at the end of the street the neighbor's kid is at it again with the bicycle, the same stretch of sidewalk back and forth, working at whatever it is, and I watch him without really seeing him.

I'm still on the path through the oaks.

The half-second of her arm under my hand is still there if I turn my attention to it, and I turn my attention to it.

The recognition arrives the way certainty tends to arrive, without announcement, just present where it wasn't before: this is going to cost me something if it ends, and I have not had anything to lose in a long time.

I sit with that until the light has finished going off the fronts of things and the street is properly into its evening version of itself, and then I go inside.

The house is the same as always. I heat up what's in the fridge and eat standing at the counter, and after I wash the plate and dry it and put it away and stand in the kitchen in the quiet that has only one person in it, and I notice what that quiet sounds like now that I've been noticing it.

I open the laptop. There's more from Cain that could wait until morning and I look at it anyway, and it holds my attention the way it usually does until somewhere around nine when it stops, the screen sitting open in front of me and the words not going anywhere useful.

I close it.

The kitchen is dim except for the light over the stove. I sit with my hands flat on the table for a minute and look at nothing in particular, and then I look at my phone.

I set it down.

I sit there for another twenty minutes and think about it, and then I pick it up again.

Chapter 4 — Harper

We have dinner before any of it is arranged, the rest of lunch warmed up, and Angela sits across from me and tells me that Maisie's class is studying habitats and Maisie's habitat is a rainforest but Angela thinks if she had to choose she'd pick the ocean even though you can't breathe there because there's more to look at.