That stretch of Route 9 is bad road to break down on. No streetlights. Fields on both sides going black into nothing. The kind of dark where your headlight only reaches so far and everything past it could be anything.
The girl was shaking. I figured it was the cold at first. It was maybe forty degrees out and she had nothing on but a thin gray hoodie and jeans worn through at the knee.
“You got a spare?” I asked her.
She nodded. Pointed at the trunk without really looking at it.
“In there. I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s not my car,” she said. “It’s my boyfriend’s.”
Something in the way she said that made me stop moving.
Not the words themselves. The way she said them. Quiet and flat, like she was repeating something she’d been told to say.
I looked at her properly for the first time.
