I Thought I’d Be Eating Dinner Alone… Until She Walked In And Said, “Can We Sit Here For A While?”

That night, for the first time, the food was not waiting for a ghost.

It was waiting for a hungry child.

My name is Marcus Hail. I was thirty years old, owned a narrow motorcycle repair shop on the east edge of town, and had gotten good at fixing engines because engines were simple.

People were not.

People broke in places you could not reach with a wrench.