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for him beyond it.
    And the hot shower they would take, and the few hours they would have together before sleep took their exhausted bodies.

Seven
    They’d met six months ago.
    Tom had been drifting from place to place for five years but was looking, maybe, for somewhere to stop.
    Stella was the only waitress at a converted railcar diner he’d gone to for lunch by chance.
    A woman, from what he’d overheard as he ate, who seemed poised between a life that had ended and one that had yet to begin.
    So they had that in common.
    Every day for a week, while Tom reconnoitered Canaan Village and the surrounding towns, determining whether there were employment opportunities and looking for a cheap place to rent, he ate breakfast and lunch at that diner, and each time picked up just a little more information about the woman he couldn’t stop looking at.
    He’d learned that Stella had never married and was fiercely independent. Though currently single, she had a loyal following: business owners and tradesmen and law enforcement officers—both local cops and state troopers from the Troop B barracks just north of town.
    These men filled the diner to capacity and beyond every morning and every noontime, asking Stella how she was doing, sympathizing with her, offering advice, making jokes, complimenting her.
    More than half of those men, Tom noted, wore wedding bands.
    Tom couldn’t help but think of the suitors in The Odyssey —the unruly men jockeying for the hand of Odysseus’s queen as Odysseus was enduring his twenty-year journey back from Troy.
    A number of these men—the more prominent business owners—had in the past encouraged Stella to run for a seat on the board of selectmen or even for state office.
    Everyone in town, it seemed, knew Stella.
    More important, everyone knew that she was smart.
    Tom eventually learned that Stella had once owned what the locals referred to as an “empire”—a long list of properties, most located in Canaan.
    Her first acquisition had been a failing women’s clothing shop, which began turning a profit within three months of her taking over.
    She’d been all of eighteen at the time, using as a down payment on the business loan the money she had earned working nights during high school.
    From there she just kept moving, taking bigger risks, but always gambling on herself.
    She had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. By her midtwenties she had earned her real estate license and immediately focused on commercial properties.
    While her intelligence and ambition were widely acknowledged, it was the fact that she had regularly invested in her community—buying up several retail properties and, as landlord, offering incentives for startup businesses to come in and create jobs—that had earned her the admiration of her neighbors.
    And their interest in her running for office.
    You could make a real difference, they’d said.
    It helped, too, that she was the daughter of a beloved state trooper captain and his obstetrician wife. Lifelong Canaan residents, long dead now.
    One helped start your life, and the other protected it.
    With her business savvy and deep roots in town, how could she lose?
    And how could their small town not benefit?
    By the time she was thirty, Stella had purchased and turned around dozens of troubled properties in town. She owned one of the historic homes in the heart of Canaan, leased a new Mercedes sports coupe every other year, collected luxury watches, vacationed—when she took time off—in northern France.
    She had even acquired the only two auto dealerships in town.
    Her empire was spreading.
    But then the recession hit.
    The dealerships—the last of her acquisitions—were the first of her assets to be lost.
    And as the recession refused to ease up, everything that she had worked so hard for began to slip through her fingers.
    A domino effect, each loss causing the next loss, which in turn caused the loss after that, and so on.
    Now, at