The engine gives one apologetic cough and dies on the long straight past the grain silo, and I know exactly where I am before I look up. I am Cordula, thirty-three, a lawyer with a very good car and a client meeting behind me, and I have coasted to a stop four kilometres outside the town I left without a word ten years ago.
There is one towing service. I know whose it is. I call anyway.
The truck arrives in twenty minutes. Ben climbs down in overalls with his sleeves rolled, and he is broader than he was, greyer at the temples than twenty-three-year-olds are allowed to be, and when he sees my face through the windscreen he stops walking for exactly one second.
Then he keeps coming. “Cordula.” Just that. He pops the bonnet, looks, closes it. “Fuel pump. Maybe the timing too. A week, if the part comes Tuesday.”
“A week.” I hear my own voice go thin. “I have hearings.”
“You have a dead car.” He wipes his hands on a rag and finally looks at me properly, and I see that he is not going to make this easy and not going to make it cruel. He was always like that. It was one of the reasons I ran.
He hooks the car, and I ride in the cab beside him because there is no other way into town. The radio is off. The seat smells of coffee and engine oil. At the crossroads he says, eyes on the road, “There's a room above the workshop. Nobody uses it.” He doesn't say it's an offer. He doesn't say it isn't. The town rises ahead of us, every window of it familiar, and I have about ninety seconds to decide where I sleep tonight.
