Chapter Three: No Way Out
Nikki woke to the smell of coffee and the wrong ceiling.
For a second she didn't know where she was — then the river came back all at once: the headlights swinging sideways, the black water coming through the windows, the man's hands hauling her out. She sat up too fast and the afghan slid off her shoulders and her heart was hammering like she'd run a mile.
The couch. The stranger's couch. Morning light through windows she'd watched go gray.
Max was in the kitchen. She could see him past the doorway — big man, bare feet, pouring coffee like this was any normal morning and not the morning after he'd fished a woman out of a river. He looked up and saw her awake, and stopped moving. Like he didn't want to startle her.
"Morning," he said. "Coffee's hot. There's — I made eggs, they're probably rubber by now."
She stared at him. Her mouth tasted like river water and fear.
"I'm Max," he added, like she might have forgotten. "You wrecked off the county bridge last night. I pulled you out."
"I remember." Her voice came out scraped raw.
She remembered too much, actually. The dishes dream still clung to her — his hand, the plate shattering. No. That was the dream. She pressed her palms flat against the couch cushions and made herself look at the room instead. Windows: two in the front room, one over the sink. Doors: front, and a hallway that probably led to a back. She counted without deciding to count. Old habit. Know where the doors are.
Max watched her do it. He didn't comment, just set a mug on the coffee table — within her reach, not his — and went back to the kitchen.
"You hungry?" he called.
The question was so ordinary it almost made her cry. She hadn't eaten since — she couldn't remember. Yesterday morning? A gas station granola bar, eaten one-handed on the highway with her eyes on the rearview mirror.
"I'm okay," she said, which was a lie, but her stomach cramped at the smell of the eggs and betrayed her.
He brought a plate anyway. Set it on the coffee table next to the mug. Then he went back to the armchair — his chair, the one he'd spent the night in — and sat down with his own plate, giving her the whole couch again. The whole room again.
She ate because her hands needed something to do. The eggs were rubber. She ate all of them.
"Your car's still in the river," Max said after a while. Quiet. Not pushing. "I can call a tow. Guy I know, he's reasonable. Get it hauled out, see what we're working with."
We. Like it was his problem too.
"I don't have —" She stopped. She didn't know what she had. Her purse was in the car. Her wallet, her cards, everything. "Okay. Yeah. Please."
He nodded and went to the kitchen for the phone — a landline, ancient, coiled cord. She watched him dial from memory and talk to somebody she didn't catch the name of. Ten minutes later he hung up.
"He'll be out within the hour," Max said. "Said the water's down enough to get a winch on it."
The hour crawled. Nikki showered — standing under his hot water until it ran lukewarm, scrubbing river out of her hair with his shampoo, trying not to think. Her clothes from last night were a damp heap on the bathroom tile. She left them there. Put the flannel and sweatpants back on. They smelled like him — woodsmoke and clean cotton — and she hated that it was comforting.
When the tow truck rumbled down the drive, she was at the window before she told herself to move.
The driver was a broad man in coveralls who took one look at the river and whistled through his teeth. "She's in there good," he said. Not unkind. Just fact.
Max waded out with him to hook the chain — Nikki watched from the bank with her arms wrapped around herself, barefoot in borrowed sweatpants, while the winch groaned and the cable went taut and her little sedan came up out of the black water nose-first, pouring river from every seam like something dredged.
It looked smaller than she remembered. Drowned things always do.
The driver walked around it, shaking his head. Popped the hood. Water sheeted off the engine block. He didn't even need to say it, but he said it anyway.
"She's done, hon. Water got in everything — engine, electrical, the works. I could tow her to a shop but you're looking at more than she's worth to fix. Days, maybe weeks, and that's if the frame's straight, which—" He glanced at the crumpled front end. "Probably not."
Nikki heard it like he was speaking from the far end of a tunnel.
"How much for the tow?" Max asked.
The driver named a number. Max paid it out of his wallet without blinking, and Nikki's throat closed, because she couldn't pay him back, couldn't pay anyone back, couldn't do anything but stand there in a stranger's flannel — a living stranger, she corrected herself hard, a living stranger who kept handing her things and asking nothing.
The truck left with her car swaying behind it. Nikki watched until the taillights disappeared past the trees.
Then there was just the river, and the house, and Max standing a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, giving her space the way he'd done all night.
"I'm stranded," she said. It wasn't a question.
"For now," Max said. "Car's gone, yeah. But you're not — you can stay here till we figure it out. No clock on it."
No clock on it. Like she had anywhere to be. Like there was anywhere she could go.
That was the thing, the thing underneath everything: she couldn't go back. Back was him — the dishes, the hand, the reason she'd been doing eighty on a rain-slicked bridge at midnight with her eyes on the mirror. And now forward was gone too, sunk in black water with her purse and her wallet and every mile she'd put between herself and him.
No way back. No way forward. No way out.
She sat down hard on the porch step, and the sob came up out of nowhere, ugly and sudden, and she pressed her face into her knees so the stranger wouldn't see.
She heard his boots on the boards. Felt him sit — not next to her. A step down. Below her. Making himself smaller.
"I'm not going to hurt you, Nikki," he said to the yard, not to her. "And I'm not going to ask you anything you don't want to tell me. But you're safe here. That's the whole deal. Same as last night."
The sobbing eased, finally, into shaking, into nothing. The morning was bright and ordinary and wrong. Birds. Sun on the wet grass. A rooster somewhere, absurdly.
"Okay," she whispered, to her knees, to the porch, to no one. "Okay."
It wasn't okay. But it was morning, and she was alive, and the man on the step below her was waiting like he had all the time in the world.
For now, that had to be enough.