Chapter 13: Winter Set

Marshall's POV

The photograph showed my hand on the small of her back, on the courthouse stairs, on the afternoon she stood up too fast.

I remembered it because I had called it a mistake at the time, and I had been right.

Cora took her hand out of my collar slowly.

She looked at the phone, and then at me.

"He wrote 'Who is he,'" she said. "He doesn't know your name."

"He knows exactly who I am," I said. "He wants you to answer. A woman who answers is a woman who explains."

She set the phone face down beside the one jar of spoons still standing.

"Then I won't answer."

I went to the window.

Fifth Street was wet and gray, and a tan sedan sat across from the bakery with its engine off.

A man in it was eating a sandwich with a camera on the dash.

"Stay here," I said.

"Marshall."

"I prosecuted for nine years. I'm very good at knocking on car windows."

I went down through the bakery, and the landlady put a roll in my hand without looking up from her dough.

The man lowered his window two inches.

He had a lanyard from a security firm in Columbus.

"Afternoon," I said. "You're parked at a hydrant, and you're photographing a pregnant woman who has asked you, through me, to stop."

"Free country."

"It is. Here's another free thing. If your firm's name lands in a court filing, you'll want that card empty."

He started the engine and drove off with the sandwich still in his hand.

I wrote his plate on my palm in pen.

By the time I got back upstairs, it was online.

Cora held her phone out to me.