Chapter 2

"Where did you get that mark?"

His hand stayed on her forearm, warm and too careful, just above Odelle's.

The rain kept streaking the windows. Not one fork moved in the whole room.

Sable looked at the scar instead of at him. The half-moon. Pale as candle wax.

"I've always had it," she said.

It was the truth, and it was all she had.

Odelle's grip tightened. "Mr. Lassiter, step back, please. She's got your watch."

"I don't have your watch." Sable didn't raise her voice. She'd learned young that a quiet voice carried farther in a loud room.

"We'll see." Odelle let go of the wrist and grabbed the backpack off the counter.

This time she didn't dump it. She dug.

Her fingers found the torn seam along the bottom, the one Sable kept meaning to sew, and worked in past the lining.

The opal ring flashed once.

Then the watch fell out onto the counter. Steel, heavy, the second hand still sweeping. It spun a half turn on the laminate and stopped face-up.

The whole diner breathed in at once.

"There," Odelle said. She was almost smiling. "There it is."

Something dropped through Sable's chest, cold and fast, the way the floor drops when a truck hits a dip on the interstate.

She had looped her own dog leash into that bag at six that morning. There had been no watch.

"I didn't put that there." She heard how it sounded. Everybody in the room heard how it sounded.

By the dish window, the busboy had not touched his towel. His cracked phone still leaned against the napkin dispenser, screen turned out.

The front door chimed.

A sheriff's deputy came in, shaking rain off his hat. Young, square, a radio clipped at his shoulder. The brass pin read HOLLIS.

"Somebody called about a theft."

"I did." Odelle was already moving toward him. "Caught her with a twelve-thousand-dollar watch in her bag. Belongs to that gentleman right there."

Hollis looked at the watch, at Sable, at the gray-haired man still standing in the aisle.

"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to not touch that again." He took a pen from his pocket and nudged the watch, reading the fine print on the back. "That the owner?"

"Cormac Lassiter," the man said. His eyes hadn't left Sable's wrist. "It's mine. Serial's BX-88432. You'll find it engraved under the band."

Hollis bent, looked, nodded once.

"Where'd you have it last, Mr. Lassiter?" he asked, pen up.

"On my wrist." Cormac's eyes came back to Sable's wrist and stayed there. "I took it off and set it on the table beside my cup while I washed up before my plate came. Twenty minutes ago. I never missed it until she called it gone."

Hollis wrote that down too.

While the deputy wrote, Cormac leaned in, so low only she caught it.

"I've come in every Tuesday for two years," he said. "Tuesday plate. Black coffee. You know the order."

"I know the order," Sable said.

"I didn't come for the eggs." His jaw worked. "You have my wife's face. I buried her twenty years ago, and you have her face, and I never once asked your name."

Sable's hands had gone still on the counter.

"Mister," she said, "I don't know what you want from me."

"Neither do I," he said. "Not yet."

Hollis straightened and clicked his pen.

"Here's what's happening," he said, to the whole room now. "I've got a reported theft, recovered property, and a statement to take from everybody who saw it. That's going to take a while."

"She can go," Odelle said. "I don't want her on my floor. Just take her in."

"Nobody's taking anybody anywhere yet." Hollis looked at Odelle, then at Sable, then past them to the door, where the rain came down in sheets over the gravel and the parked cars. "Nobody leaves this lot until I say so."