Chapter 8

"J uliet.Hello?Juliet?"

I jerked toward the door, my whole body practically convulsing with shock. "What?"

"I guess you're not as street-smart as I thought," Camille said, grinning at me.

I still didn't understand. "Huh?"

"You didn't hear me coming. Now, when I'm walking around in the city, I pay attention because you told me that it's important."

"Oh." I nodded and tried to breathe normally. "Yeah, it is. It definitely is."

She stepped into my office. "Are you ok? I actually said your name a bunch of times but I don't think you heard me and you also didn't hear when I knocked. You didn't see me, either." She glanced at the totally transparent wall, because yes, it was certainly easy to see through there. "What were you focusing on so hard? Do you need help with something?"

I'd been staring at my phone, looking through local news reports and trying to see if anyone was saying anything yet about what had happened. "No, it's nothing," I told her. As much as it had rocked me, it really wasn't important enough to make the news, not even in local neighborhood groups. I tried to turn my attention to the person now standing at my desk. "Did you need something?"

Yes, she had wanted to suggest that the two of us should go and get lunch together. "We could grab something fast," she told me.

"Oh, um, no thanks," I said. "I have a lot to do."

"We could bring it back here and have a working lunch, like Beckett always does." Both of us glanced toward his office, but he wasn't eating. He'd swung his chair around to face the windows, too, so we couldn't see his face.

"Sorry. I brought food from home," I lied. I hadn't and I was going to eat the candy I had found at the bottom of my purse for my meal. It was less than ideal (unwrapped) but I didn't want to take the risk of walking out on the street right now. Not after…

"Ok," she said, and she sounded disappointed. I had a momentary thought that she wanted to be friends, but my mind was definitely elsewhere. Was it hot in here? I wiped my hand over my forehead and found that yes, I was sweating, although everyone else around me seemed comfortable and not overheated at all.

Camille left when I continued to stare at my phone, although now I wasn't seeing anything on it because my thoughts had returned to what had happened that morning. I shouldn't have tried to do a drop-off before work; it was out of my usual routine with those things, or as much as a routine as I had. The sky had just started to lighten as the sun rose, but it hadn't been too dark to see…

I got up, shoving back my chair hard so that it shot away on its wheels and rolled into the cabinet behind my desk. I didn't bother to check if my coworkers had witnessed that as I quickly walked out of my office in the opposite direction from the elevators, and I moved purposefully toward the door that led to the old stairwell in the center of the building. When it shut behind me, I leaned against it for a moment to breathe again. But I was too keyed up to stay in one place so I started walking in a little circle on the landing. What was the right thing to do in a situation like the one I'd confronted earlier? How would someone else—a calm, intelligent person, someone like Beckett, for instance—what would Beckett have done if he'd had to deal with that?

Of course, he wouldn't have been there to begin with. He wouldn't have been in debt, so that he needed to do dangerous things to free himself of it. He wouldn't have driven a car that ran questionably, so that he might have gotten stranded in a part of the city he wasn't familiar with, and he would have made sure that he was familiar with it before he ever went there. If he'd seen a man with a gun, and if that other man had pointed the weapon at him…

My legs had started shaking, and I sat down on the step that I had also used in the past. I'd needed to be here alone to sort through my problems before and now I was back. The strange heat I'd felt in my office was gone and I was cold, so I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my face against my knees.

That man had shot at me. The bullet had passed over my head but it had been so loud. I had never been around a gun before, except a few times at my grandparents' cottage up north. My grandpa had said he was a hunter, but mostly he liked to walk around in the woods and I didn't even think that his rifle had been loaded. Anyway, we hadn't been allowed to touch it, let alone to fire it.

I had been shocked by the sight of the black gun stuck down the front of the man's pants this morning and then I'd been even more shocked when he'd pulled it out. "I'm just here to give you this," I'd told him, offering the flat envelope with one hand and putting my other palm up near my head, to show that I wasn't armed myself. "Here. You can take it and I'll go."

There had been something wrong with him, though, because he'd been so twitchy. I'd seen people high before, of course, but usually not at six-thirty in the morning and never while they held a deadly weapon. "Who the fuck are you?" he'd asked, and his hand around the gun had jerked. "Where's Jin?"

"I don't know who that is. Please take this," I'd begged, rattling the envelope a little and simultaneously backing away.

He'd raised the gun and pointed it at me, and I'd instinctively ducked and run back to my car as he'd fired. Screaming, I'd slammed the door and locked it. I should never have gotten out, because that wasn't usual. Someone was supposed to meet me and take the package, we weren't supposed to talk, and we definitely weren't supposed to shoot at each other! I'd tried to start the engine but it hadn't turned over, and when I'd finally got it going and had thrown it into reverse, he'd fired again. The car had stalled and I'd still been screaming, but then the man had run down the block.

He'd only been a few yards away when he'd pulled the trigger, which meant that either he had terrible aim or that he'd missed on purpose—like warning shots. He hadn't taken the envelope, either, so I'd had to drive back to the sender to explain what had happened and that guy had been furious with me.

"You had one fucking job," he'd seethed, and I wasn't sure, but I thought that I'd seen the outline of a gun underneath his shirt, too. I wasn't going to get paid and I couldn't continue to do this. Obviously, I had to stop because it was just too dangerous. I'd known that it was and I'd been scared—but nothing compared to how I felt now. Nothing.

I took out my phone and texted the only person that I could talk to about it. "I'm out," I typed. "I'm done."

It didn't take very long for an answer to come back. "Hey mama!" Gigi wrote. "What do you mean by that?"

Mama? I shook my head. "I mean I'm not doing the job anymore." I hesitated and then wrote, "Sorry." I was, a little, because I thought it might get her into trouble. She'd received that finder's fee for bringing me on, and maybe she'd have to return it.

"Working at Whitaker Enterprises can be tough!!" she responded. "Come talk to me over coffee before you make a big decision like quitting. See you in 10."

I looked at the time. I could give her a few minutes and I thought I should explain the danger, in case she somehow wasn't aware of it herself. "See you there," I quickly wrote back.

When I left the stairwell and passed by his office, I could feel Beckett's eyes on me. I snuck a glance back as I got my purse but he had returned to working on something. Good, because I didn't want to explain what I was doing or, if he happened to notice, why I was so upset.

Of course, now I had another boss to worry about, too. When the elevator doors opened at our floor, Camille stepped out. "Oh," she said. "You're going somewhere?"

"Just to my car." I pushed the button for the lobby several times and didn't meet her eyes, and when I left our building, I rushed across the wet sidewalk to the coffee shop. I was sure with every step that I would hear that huge bang of a gun again, and that someone would be chasing after me. I moved so fast that I beat Gigi, so I had to sit and fidget while I waited for her.

"Hey!" she called as she breezed in. With the long, pink wig she was wearing, she looked different enough that the manager probably wouldn't have recognized her, but I still glanced over at the counter to make sure that we were in the clear. "Want a drink? My treat," she told me.

I was clutching a cup of water. I'd been so optimistic lately about my future financial prospects that I'd been buying coffee now and again, but those days were over. Since I was going to give up on my delivery service, I would return to only free drinks. "No, I don't need any stimulants right now. Gigi, I'm sorry but—"

"I'm going to get you something," she interrupted, and strolled away to cut into the line. I had to wait even longer for her to pick up a pair of very complicated coffees before she returned to our table. She set down the jumbo cups and carefully adjusted her chair, sitting close enough to me that I scooted away. "There you go," she announced. "I remember how you love caramel so I got you that."

I didn't even like caramel that much, so she hadn't been thinking of me. Anyway, my stomach was too knotted to drink the whipped cream tower in front of me. "Thank you, but—"

"So what's this I hear about you quitting?" she asked, smiling at me. "You know you can't. Think of the money!"

"I have to," I said, and explained what had happened that morning. "He shot at me," I reiterated. "I could have been killed. There's no way that I can keep doing this."

She had lost her extremely fake smile, and she took a sip of her drink before she spoke. "Juliet, come on. It wasn't so bad."

"Did you hear me?" Due to the fact that anger was replacing my fear, my voice went up. "Did you hear what I just told you?"

"Everyone in the fucking city heard you, you whiny bitch!" She glanced around and lowered her own voice. "You can't quit."

"Yes, I can." I stood up, leaving the caramel drink on the table. "Sorry if it gets you in trouble or—"

Gigi grabbed my wrist and her long, beautiful nails dug into my skin. "Sit down. We need to talk about this."

I peeled off her fingers and I did sit, but I didn't do any talking. Instead, I listened as she told me how there was no way that I could just tap out. I was part of it now. Her man Val trusted me, she said, and his employers trusted him. That chain couldn't break so I wasn't going anywhere.

"Are you saying that your boyfriend will come after me if I try to leave? Is that what you mean? Who does he work for?" I asked her. I heard the panic in my voice. "Who are we mixed up with?"

"This isn't my fault!" Her eyes darted around the coffee shop, and I noticed again how she'd positioned her chair. She was sitting so that she could see the door and the window, with her back to a wall. It was like she was watching for trouble.

"Ok," I said. "Ok, I'm not blaming you. I just want to know what's happening."

"I'm not exactly sure," she answered, and she put one of her beautiful nails between her teeth as she spoke. She told me what she did know, mostly about how her man was moving up and getting more responsibility and money, and reminding me that he was so great. She showed me her new purse and also mentioned that he'd bought the wig she was currently wearing. He was the person who'd talked to me about taking the job, so I already knew that he was pretty repellant…that made me think of something.

"Besides him, who else knows about me?" I asked. "Who else knows my name and what I'm doing?"

She shook her head. "Why should I care?"

I kept questioning, and it turned out that maybe no one really knew who I was. Gigi hadn't told anyone else and she didn't think that her man knew my name at all. That was a huge relief, but it was so frustrating that she still wasn't listening to me. I needed to make myself clear: my future did not include making those deliveries, not ever again. "Gigi, I don't want to get you in trouble, but I really can't take the envelopes anymore," I said. "I won't. I was already worried, or more like, I've been scared out of my mind all the time, but today—"

"Ok!" she said. "Just shut up for a minute." She massaged her temples, careful that her nails didn't mess up her hair. "I'll figure out what to do and I'll tell you."

I already knew what I was doing, but I didn't leave the coffee shop until a while later, because she continued to try to convince me that nothing was so bad. I hadn't actually gotten shot, right? And wasn't the money amazing? Yeah, it was—but it wasn't worth my life. When I mentioned that, she told me I was being way, way too dramatic. Finally, I said that we were only arguing in circles and I went back to the office, which I did by scuttling like a bug as fast as my legs could carry me.

Even when I returned to work, though, I didn't get a lot accomplished. "The guys that my man works for are different from the people I grew up with," she had told me, and the entire time she'd spoken, her eyes had moved around the café. "They're smart and they're organized. They're fucking waist-deep in money, too, but it's like…it's like they don't care as much about that. They're not in it to get rich. It seems like they just want to hurt people." Then she told me about the source of their income, which was mostly drugs. She was highly involved in the sale and distribution of that product. "Last week, I kept back a little extra for personal use," she'd said, flicking her gaze between the door and the window. But her man had found out. "He was so mad and I…"

I had never seen Gigi look scared. She had never been anything but in control; even when she was getting fired from Whitaker Enterprises, she had manipulated the situation to the hilt. She was scared now, though—scared to death. And that, on top of my own fear, was making me practically pee in my pants.

"You said that you were going to run to Brazil," I had reminded her. She'd once told me that she would take off if anything went sideways, and that was where she would head. "Why don't you just leave?"

She'd pulled herself back together when she heard that, and had adjusted some long, pink hair forward over her shoulder to stroke it with her big thumb, like a pet cat. "I'm not going anywhere and neither are you," she'd said scornfully. "Are you really willing to give up on the money? I'm not."

I was, I decided as I sat at my desk. This was way beyond the pale and it was way more than I could deal with. I went to the bathroom, fairly certain that I was going to throw up, and tried to think about what to do. I would have to run, obviously. I would have to take off. Maybe I could enter the witness protection program or I could create my own, hiding away for the rest of my life.

If I did that, I'd have to be away from everyone. I'd never see my family again, not my brother or my sisters, not my niece, not my mom and dad. Holy Mary. What had I gotten myself into? I patted my face because I was sweating again, and returned to my desk to be greeted by more bad news.

"Please come to my office," my screen said. Ok, well, I also had a job I was supposed to be doing here. I got out my notebook and dragged my feet to Beckett's door, and I took my regular chair across from him.

"I found a buyer," he announced.

All I could think about were the drugs that Gigi had just been discussing. "What?"

"For your car," he stated. "I found a buyer for your car."

"What…" I shook my head. "It's not for sale."

"You can trade it in for something with a lower payment and better terms. Your current car loan is practically usurious. I still don't understand why you locked yourself into that, but now you can get out."

"What…who would want my car?" I asked.

"I have a cousin up north who owns a dealership, among other ventures. He made some calls and found someone in Farmington Hills who's interested." Beckett turned back to his monitors. "It's all set up, just waiting for signatures. We'll go today after we leave here."

"We will go sell my car," I attempted to clarify. "You and I, together, in a deal that you worked out for me."

"Is that a question? The answer is yes." He continued typing.

"No," I said. "No, I don't want to do that."

He looked up and his beautiful eyes narrowed. "Why? This is a satisfactory conclusion to the issue that you were complaining about while you were at my house."

"I wasn't complaining to you…maybe I was, but I didn't mean that I expected you to fix it for me."

"If you expected it or not, the problem is now solved. You're welcome and be ready to leave at six."

"Beckett, no!" I said, a lot more forcefully. "You can't sell my car out from under me!"

He was still just staring. "You would be the one selling it, obviously. I don't understand your objection. You told me that you can't afford the payment and that you got in over your head. The car is junk and we're lucky that anyone is willing to buy it with the damage to it."

"What do you know about the damage?"

"I did a quick survey earlier today. I wanted to ask you to join me but you had disappeared from your desk," he said.

I tried to breathe normally and also to make my spinning brain figure out what to do. Before I could, though, his phone rang and he picked it up. "Yes, go ahead," he told the person on the other end, and I waited for a moment but this call was obviously something that he needed to deal with, and I was not. So I went back to my desk and I decided to do something that my sister Nicola had perfected in the past: I wrote out a life plan. Hers had been to direct all of us into what she considered were the smart, proper, and frugal avenues of behavior. Mine was a little different.

My life plan was solely intended to keep me alive. I typed as fast as I could, outlining all the steps that I would need to take to get myself out of this problem. Beckett had already solved one for me: I would need a new car, different from the one I'd done the deliveries in. I would need a new apartment, too, and before I could back out of it, I texted the management of the Falstaff and told them that I would not be renewing my lease.

I wrote to Leni and Elissa with the same message, that I was sorry but that they would have to find a new place to live. Neither of them answered and I had to think that they wouldn't care very much. They'd liked the location and the fact that the building management never intervened in their parties (and neither had I). They also liked how I paid the bills on time, something Elissa told me they'd struggled with in the past. Even when things had really, really sucked for me, I'd kept the lights on, but the three of us weren't friends. Ruslan, their boss, wouldn't have anything to say about it either…I hoped. My debt to him was gone, one hundred percent paid off. That didn't mean that he'd quietly let me back out of sharing the space with the women he called his "girls" though. The thought of Ruslan added another level of stress and now my head started pounding.

Ok, so new apartment. New car. New job? I would have to find one, if I moved to a new city. I looked around, thinking about leaving here. I'd been dreaming about going to a new place and the cozy apartment I'd have with the new furniture and lots of throw pillows. But did I really want to go? Besides a break for college, I'd spent all of my life in Detroit. Everything and almost everyone I knew was here.

Six o'clock came before I expected it, and there was Beckett at my door checking his phone. Camille was still in her office but many of the other people in our department had left. There were two fewer of them this week, since (as I'd expected) more were quitting. It meant that there weren't many of our colleagues to notice us leaving like this, but I asked my boss if he was worried about it.

"Remember how you kept talking about how we shouldn't have gone to dinner together," I reminded him. "Now we're…"

"We're going somewhere in separate cars. Drive down to my floor and then follow me," he said, and stepped off the elevator.

Separate cars did not provide an arena for the discussion that I wanted to have with him. I had questions about why he'd gotten involved in my private affairs, about why I should trust this car buyer whom I knew nothing about, about how this deal had worked out at all. Once we arrived at our destination (which took forever to achieve because Beckett drove ridiculously slowly), I did raise some of those issues but he was mostly interested in hammering out the deal with the guy who wanted to buy my car. Actually, I wasn't even sure that this person wanted the deal at all, because it seemed like he had somehow been forced into participating. He was obviously very uncomfortable and kept saying things like, "I know how much I owe to Ryan, I understand the favors he's done for me," and, "I want to continue doing business with the Whitakers." Then he looked over at my car and seemed repulsed.

I was feeling the same way about the new vehicle that I was supposed to be buying. It was…ugly. It was small and cheap looking, with no extras at all. No leather seats, no seat heaters, a radio that only got local stations. No cameras, no remote start, no gorgeous (but maybe fake—I'd never been sure) wood trim. I looked over at my real car, which had all that and even more, and I remembered driving it off the lot and being very proud of myself. It meant something, I had thought. I'd sent a picture to my brother and he'd been so impressed that he'd said he was going to buy that model for himself, too.

I sighed a little. That wouldn't be happening, since Patrick was living in his childhood bedroom with his baby and with no job, as far as I could tell. And now, my own beautiful car was a delivery vehicle for criminals. Now, instead of buying food and other necessities, I was trying to keep up on payments for a hunk of metal, plastic, and (maybe) wood that was gradually falling apart, piece by piece, system by system.

"This is fine. I don't mind the new car at all," I announced, although no one seemed very interested in my opinion. That was annoying, to say the least.

When the dealer walked away for a moment and as Beckett was rereading every line of the contract and loan documents, I put my hand in between his eyes and the glass. For the first time since we'd arrived, he seemed to notice that I was there. "Who's Ryan?" I asked first.

"My cousin, Ryan Whitaker." He frowned and tapped the screen. "That's not the language I specified. We'll remove that clause."

"Pay attention to me for a moment," I ordered. "Are you forcing this car guy into a bad deal because if he doesn't, your cousin Ryan will drop him and refuse to do business with him?"

"No, we're asking him to participate in a transaction that will have a neutral outcome, neither profitable nor a huge loss. He's the one extrapolating because he's afraid of losing future opportunities with my cousin."

"Which means that he does think that he'll be hurt if he doesn't take my car off my hands."

"Yes, he may be afraid that my family will take its business elsewhere. That's not something that I have power over, no matter what anyone believes." Beckett removed my hand so that he could continue reading. "In any case, no one is coming out the loser here, and you're definitely winning." That was true, because we'd already discussed my new payment and it was much, much lower than what I had now, with a shorter term, and a lot less cost overall.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked next, but then the guy had come back and we were tweaking and signing millions of documents and then, in a lot less time than I would have thought, the dealer was shaking my hand and I had a new car.

"I'm a little surprised," Beckett stated as my old one disappeared into the lot, along with all the potato chip bags that I'd left under the front seat and a lot of memories and expectations.

"You're surprised? That makes two of us," I said. "For one thing, I didn't think I'd end this day owning a different car." I hadn't thought I'd begin the day with someone shooting at me either…sugar. I started to feel overheated when I remembered it, in an "I might faint" kind of way.

"What surprises me is how you went along with it," he continued. "I thought that you would waste more time fruitlessly arguing before you acquiesced."

"I wouldn't have argued fruitlessly, but you're right, I usually wouldn't have gone along with this." After what had happened this morning, I didn't seem to have as much fight in me as usual. "Thank you very much for taking time out of your day to fix my problem, which I know you found annoying. I appreciate it a lot."

"You're welcome," he said, and this time, it didn't sound sarcastic. He meant it. "I owed you for Saturday."

"You mean because I brought that stuff to your house?" I shrugged. "That was nothing."

"I meant the blanket."

How I'd found it and covered him? I shrugged again, because that also hadn't been anything at all. "Well, I'll be sitting here for a while to read the car manual, so I'll see you tomorrow."

"What? You plan to sit in this lot right now?"

I didn't want to go home, and I wasn't looking at my phone although I knew that texts were probably piling up there. "My sister Sophie got so mad at me and my brother when we were teenagers because we got a car for just us, a new one, and then we didn't treat it very well. She yelled for hours." She hadn't thought that I'd listened to her, but I had. One of her main points was that we'd never even bothered to learn our way around that car, because the manual was still wrapped in plastic.

"Why don't you read it over dinner?" he suggested. "We could stop for something. There's a good Lebanese restaurant near here."

"Really? How do you know?"

Beckett held out his phone. "Don't you have one of these?"

"Ok, smartie. I thought you said that we wouldn't go to dinner together again." And when he'd said that, I'd thought it was a shame.

"Do you plan to drink yourself silly?" he asked me.

"No, and I hadn't meant to do that the first time, either," I retorted angrily.

"This isn't ‘going to dinner,'" Beckett explained. "It doesn't mean anything except that we're out in the same neighborhood that neither of us knows well, around the time that is a generally acceptable hour to consume food."

So that was what happened: we went to a restaurant to consume food, but we didn't "go to dinner." I followed him at the same snail's pace and the new car didn't seem absolutely terrible, although it had crap for acceleration and I missed the multiple camera angles in my former ride. When we'd been seated, he carefully picked among the items on the menu and I ordered number seven and extra hummus, plus rice pudding for dessert. I also asked for an iced tea, so there would be no chance of a repetition of the margarita issue.

After we ordered, I glanced quickly at my phone and saw that my two roommates had separately said fine, they were moving out, good luck or whatever, and that the management of the Falstaff hadn't responded. They weren't great about getting back to people, probably because they were so busy dealing with prospective tenants.

"Looks like I'm moving," I said conversationally. "This is a big day for changes." It wasn't every day that I nearly lost my life, either, a thought which made me drink all of the water in my glass. "Do you want that?" I asked, and when Beckett shook his head, I drank his, too.

"I'm glad you decided to get yourself out of that apartment. The building is owned by an LLC registered in the Cayman Islands, which is tied to a Maltese partnership and several others in Cyprus. Their real estate purchases are a form of money laundering," he explained, when I clearly didn't follow. "They're currently under investigation by the SEC, in conjunction with the Department of Justice and the State Department. I would expect maintenance issues and other problems to intensify."

There went my security deposit. "I had no idea," I said and now he stared at me.

"Why?"

"Why…" I trailed off, shrugging.

"Why didn't you know that? While I waited for the elevator to our garage, I was able to determine that the corporate address of the owner of your building is a PO box in a tax haven. From that fact alone, it was obvious that something was wrong."

"Why were you looking up the owner of my apartment building?"

"Curiosity. Where do you plan to go next?"

I played with a piece of pita bread. "I'm not exactly sure. I was thinking about leaving Detroit."

"Really," he said, and I looked up to check his expression for disappointment or concern. I didn't see either of those emotions there, only bland curiosity. "Have you been job hunting?"

"Not yet," I answered, and his face changed. It was only minutely, but I could tell that he was dismissing the idea of me going elsewhere.

But all he said was, "I see." Of course, he couldn't, because he had no idea what had happened this morning when I'd heard the noise of that shot, so loud that I'd instinctively—

"Juliet."

"What?"

"I'm curious as to why you would consider leaving Whitaker Enterprises. Does it have something to do with your relationship with Camille?"

"No. We're fine," I said. "We work well together. If you're still talking about her adopting me—"

"Mentoring you, not adopting."

"Why are you so into that?" I asked him. "Why do you care if there's someone to show me the right way? Who says that I'm not doing just fine as I am?"

One of his eyebrows raised and I read the message loud and clear. He was saying it, obviously. He was saying that I needed help, that I needed guidance.

"That's why you did this thing with my car," I stated. "It's because you believe that I'm so hopeless and helpless that you had to step in." That was galling, but it was worse to know that he might have been correct.

"No, that's not why," he disagreed, and I held out my hands, palms up, as I waited for more of an explanation. First, he took a moment to carefully select a bite of hummus untainted by the extra oil on the top, which was delicious. Then he chewed his whole wheat pita, still not answering.

"Beckett…"

"I helped with the car because I thought you'd made a horrendously bad decision," he said, which made me feel so, sooo much better. But then he continued, "I've done that, too."

"Really?" I looked at him skeptically. "You have?"

"I was involved in a pyramid scheme."

"Like, you were the mastermind of one?" It was the only way that I could see him connected with something like that.

"No, I wasn't a criminal fraudster," he said, and shook his head. But he did seem slightly amused at the thought.

"I meant it as a compliment," I explained. "I meant that I couldn't imagine you getting tricked, so you had to be the trickster."

"Well, I didn't always have the experience and acumen that I do now. I believed what I was told and I lost my shirt."

Beckett without a shirt. Despite everything that had happened that day, my thoughts snagged for a moment on an image of that and how absolutely stunning—

But he had continued talking. "My goal, at the time, was to demonstrate to everyone that I was smart and capable. I wanted them to know that I wasn't a stupid kid whom they could push around, not anymore. I thought that if I could make my fortune by myself, without any family connections, then that would do it. I would prove that I was…" He considered. "I wanted to show everyone that I was more than what they thought."

I found myself nodding. "That's exactly how I felt about my old car. I wanted people to see me and think, ‘Juliet's a success. She really did it.'"

"No one who knows anything about cars would ever think—"

"Ok, ok," I said, holding up my hands again, but this time in a "halt" gesture. When people saw me driving the car now parked in the lot outside this restaurant, they would probably believe that I needed charitable handouts. And they would be right.

I also ate some hummus off a non-whole wheat pita and thought about what he'd just said to me. "When you got scammed, who were you trying to prove yourself to?" I asked.

"My attorneys," he answered. "My aunt, who had taken me in. My peers. Everyone. I lost twenty thousand dollars, everything I had in my personal account."

"Wait a minute. How old were you when this happened?"

"Sixteen," he told me.

"You were sixteen and you had twenty thousand dollars to play with, and you lost it all?" I gasped, and he nodded. "Holy Mary! But that wasn't even your fault! At sixteen, I did egregiously stupid things. If I'd had that much money, I probably would have lost it, too."

"Like what? What did you do when you were that age?"

Where to begin? "I was trying so hard to be popular, I would have done just about anything. You name it," I suggested. "At least you had a good goal in mind."

"I ended up in the same situation as you did with your former car. I made poor decisions and wasted money," he said. "The only thing I proved was that I wasn't capable at all."

Except he had been a kid, and I was an adult. "At sixteen, someone should have been helping you," I said.

"With very little effort, I was able to help you today. Didn't I?"

I looked into his gorgeous, blue-grey eyes. Was he really asking me for assurance? "You helped me so much," I answered. "Some other things happened that were really giving me pause about humanity in general, but you went out of your way to give me a hand. That was really nice of you and I'm very grateful."

"I'm not a nice man."

I raised a shoulder and let it drop.

"I'm not," he reiterated. "Not at all."

"Maybe not to everybody. You are to me," I said, and when I looked across the table again, he was smiling.