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engine.
    Then she wiped her eyes with the wrist of her long-sleeved T-shirt, gathered her purse off the floor by her feet, and said, “Oh, good. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Across from him, Ashley handed her menu to the waitress. “Is there bacon in the green beans?”
    “Yes.”
    The waitress’s name tag read “Makenna.” Her eye makeup was neatly divided vertically into an area of blue on the inside and an area of reddish-brown on the outside.
    “How about the baked beans, are they made with pork?”
    Makenna scratched her scalp with her pen. “Yeah, I think they are.”
    “Okay. I’d like the vegetable plate, then, with corn.”
    “You get four vegetables and a bread.”
    “I know. I want corn, corn, corn, and corn. And a biscuit.”
    Makenna started writing it down. Roman interrupted, “She’s not having that.”
    “Yeah I am.”
    “You haven’t eaten in two days. You can’t just have corn.”
    “Everything else is made with meat. I’m a vegetarian.”
    Of course she was a vegetarian. Because she’d been put on the earth to plague him.
    He flipped through his menu, looking for something with actual calories that she could eat. The restaurant was a family-style place, and all the photographs in the menu were of meat—fried, grilled, dripping juice. “Omelet,” he said.
    “I don’t like eggs.”
    “Mashed potatoes.”
    “Is the gravy made with meat?” Ashley asked.
    Makenna sighed. “I think so. You want me to check?”
    “No, I’m sure it is.”
    “So have them without gravy,” Roman said.
    Ashley wrinkled her nose. “They’re made from flakes. With just butter? Ew.”
    He flipped another page. “You can have fish.”
    “I don’t eat fish. I’m a vegetarian .”
    “Fish aren’t meat.”
    “Of course they’re meat.”
    “So get some cheese. Grilled cheese. French fries.”
    “The cheese won’t be real cheese, it’ll be that cheese that’s made from hydrogenated oil, which is disgusting. And the bread will be white bread, like eating a cotton ball. And—”
    He dropped his menu on the table and gave up. “Fine. Eat whatever you want.”
    But when it was his turn to order, he got extra hash browns and a side of pancakes he didn’t want. Just in case.
    After Makenna left, Ashley slid the plastic bowl of half-and-half tubs to a spot in front of her and began stacking them to form a tower. Their booth sat by the window beneath a light with a faux stained-glass shade of red, green, and yellow plastic. Two of the three bulbs had burned out. The gloom highlighted all the hills and hollows of her face. Her shirtsleeves flapped at the cuff as she built, revealing wrist bones as delicate as a bird’s.
    She looked like a girl.
    She looked like what she was—a grieving granddaughter, eight years younger than Roman. Younger than that, if you looked at what she’d done with her life. Or not done with it.
    The kind of person who could barely manage to pay the heat bill, but damned if she wasn’t doing an excellent job of screwing up all his plans.
    “So tell me what your grand vision is,” she said to the creamer. “For Sunnyvale.”
    “Why, so you can change my mind?”
    “Because we’re going all the way to Georgia together, and we need to find something to talk about.”
    “Your friend is in Georgia?”
    She nodded.
    Georgia.
    Fucking Georgia.
    The news did something to his body—disconnected it from reason long enough for his fist to hit the table and make the creamers jump. Make one of them spin in a lopsided circle and then roll off onto her lap.
    Ashley flinched as though he’d struck her.
    Roman took a deep breath.
    He wasn’t that kind of man. He’d come into close proximity to physical violence onlytwice in his life, and both times he’d thrown up. An unpleasant side effect of having been fathered by a man who was serving a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder of two women.
    Roman had no stomach for violence.
    He didn’t get angry. He was not the sort