RILEY
The coffee shop on my corner does a very good almond flat white and plays music at a volume that allows you to exist near other people without having to interact with them, which is why I go there every Tuesday morning before the shop opens and sit in the back booth and drink coffee and read or think or just exist quietly for forty-five minutes before the day starts.
She sat down across from me on a Tuesday.
I hadn't seen her come in. That was the first thing I noticed afterward — that she'd moved through a busy coffee shop without triggering the low-grade awareness I'd been running since Knox arrived, the way you learn to notice things when your nervous system has decided that unexpected visitors are a category of event worth tracking.
She was beautiful in the specific way of wo
