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"Mm." Pearl looked at Mason. "The better part of a week, Mason Royston."

And Lauren watched him, waiting for the denial, the easy laugh, the neighborly wave of the hand that would put the whole thing back in its box, and instead the man leaned back on his stool with his coffee like he'd paid for reserved seating and said, "Five days, if you count today."

The counter made the sound again, louder.

"Mason."

"What? She can count." He tipped his mug at Pearl. "You'd have the arithmetic by supper anyway. I'm saving you the legwork."

"I always liked this one," Pearl told the room. "The other three you have to interrogate."

"There's nothing to hide," Lauren said. "He's being neighborly." And she heard how it landed, exactly like a woman with something to hide, and a man in a seed cap three stools down grinned into his eggs, and she gave up on the room as a lost cause and turned to deal with the smug local problem beside her, and that was when she noticed she could still feel his hand.

At the small of her back. Ten minutes gone, one thin layer of cotton, and the print of it was still sitting there warm as a sunburn, five fingers of information her body had decided to keep, and he was three feet away drinking coffee and being enjoyed by an entire county, completely unbothered, while she sat on her grandfather's stool feeling a hand that wasn't there.

So she lit into him about the coffee.

"You could have warned me," she said, low and hot, while Pearl was off pouring refills. "One word in the truck. 'Pearl runs a courtroom, plead nothing.' That's all it would've taken."

"And miss this?"

"You're feeding it. You know that. Five, if you count today, what is wrong with you, you could deny something. Pick anything. Deny one thing for the hell of it."

"Lying to Pearl's a sin in this county." He said it gravely, the grin sitting just behind it, not on his mouth yet, waiting. "They hold a tribunal at the church. Marge testifies. It's a whole thing, ma'am."

And there it was.

"Okay." Lauren set her cup down and turned on the stool to face him properly, and something in the way she did it made the seed-cap man put down his fork. "That's the last one. The very last one. You call me ma'am one more time and I stop answering you altogether, I mean it, you'll be talking to the weather. I am not a hundred years old. I have a name. It's two syllables, and you've been calling me ma'am all week knowing it annoys me."

The diner had gone helpfully silent for this. Pearl, back at the register, looked like Christmas had come early.

"She's right," Pearl announced. "That girl didn't drive two states to get ma'amed to death by a Royston. Her granddaddy'd back her, God rest him. He didn't answer to sir even once in forty years, I tried."

"Noted," Mason said, and he was looking at Lauren when he said it, and the grin finally arrived, slow, but there was something under it that wasn't teasing at all, something that sounded like the word being put away. "Lauren."

Her name, in his mouth, on purpose, in a room full of witnesses. It should not have done anything. It did several things, all of them well south of her ribs and none of them anybody's business, and she turned back to her coffee and drank some as though that had been the plan all along.

"Anyway," Pearl said, mercifully, to Mason. "You'll both be at the picnic Saturday."

"What picnic?" Lauren asked, before she could stop herself.

Pearl's whole face organized itself into a smile that Lauren, who had once watched a chain-store manager smile while he read out her closing costs, recognized instantly as the smile of somebody with plans. She reached over without looking and tapped the flyer taped to the pie case, like tapping a law.

"Oh, honey," Pearl said. "The picnic."

Down the counter, the kitchen door swung half open, and Marge stood in it with a peach pie, giving Pearl a long look over the top of it, and a bell rang as the front door opened and a big gray-haired man in a Harvey's t-shirt came in for his coffee as he plainly had every morning for decades, and Marge's look at Pearl deepened into something with a whole history in it, and Pearl did not see it, or performed not seeing it with forty years of practice, and Lauren, watching all of it, thought: this town has more running plots than a soap opera, and apparently I'm in one now.

The pie, when it came, was the best thing she had eaten since Denver, and she said so, and Marge's ears went pink with pleasure clear from the kitchen door.

At the register, while Mason was down the counter having his hand shaken over something by the seed-cap man, Pearl rang up the pie and leaned in, and her voice dropped out of broadcast for the first time all morning.

"You watch that one, honey." A nod down the counter, no theater in it now. "Not because he's trouble. Honest as they come, that boy, always was, you could weigh feed on his word. It's just he's been charming this county since he could walk, and nobody in it has ever once made him work for a thing." She snapped the register shut and slid the pie box across, and the wink arrived after all. "Do him a world of good to work for it."

"I'm not," Lauren started, and Pearl was already gone down the counter with the coffee pot, the way a woman leaves a conversation she considers won.

They did the hardware run after, which took forty minutes and generated three more conversations, because apparently Mason Royston could not buy hinges in this county without being congratulated on things nobody said out loud, and by the time they got back in the truck Lauren had been called "the Merritt girl" nine times and "honey" fourteen and had stopped correcting anyone about anything, on the principle that you cannot argue with weather.

The ride home was the ride in, backward, except that everything in the cab had gotten louder. The six inches between his hand and her knee. The warm spot on her back that would apparently be staying through the weekend. The radio was playing somebody else's heartbreak and neither of them changed the station and neither of them talked over it for ten entire miles, and it was the loudest silence Lauren had ever sat in, and she watched the brown grass go by and worked very hard on the paint math, which kept coming out in fingerprints.