Chapter 13: The Check

Ingrid's POV

I watched him from the shop window while he sat on the outside stairs with a birthday card in his hands.

He had been sitting there for twenty minutes, turning it over.

Men from the city sit like that when they are deciding how to leave.

My ex had sat on those same stairs the February before he went.

He said he was going for cigarettes, and his truck was gone by supper.

I put my coffee down and went back to the work order on the bench, because I had a yard to run.

A white hatchback came down the gravel at two, too fast, and stopped crooked beside the travel lift.

A young woman got out in scrubs covered in cat hair.

She ran across the lot and took the stairs two at a time, and Finbar stood up just in time to be hit by her.

They stood on my stairs with their arms around each other for a long time.

I looked away. It was not mine to watch.

When she let go, she wiped her face on her sleeve and looked down at me in the doorway.

"You're Ingrid," she said.

"I am."

"You're the one who bites."

"Only when people are late."

"I'm Hattie. I'm so late."

"You drove two and a half hours with a turn signal on the whole way," I said. "I could hear it from the road."

She laughed, wetly, and Finbar laughed with her, and something in my chest let go a notch that I had not meant to give.

She had brought a laptop and a bag of cheese curds from a gas station.

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