There’s something raw in them.
“I’m trying,” she whispers.
“I know.”
We sit in silence while she works through half the bagel. I drink my coffee and pretend I’m not watching her, not cataloging the way her shoulders curve inward, the way her fingers tap against the table in a pattern that looks like anxiety given physical form.
“What do you need?” I ask finally. “To feel more settled. To make this place feel less...”
“Beige?” she offers, and there’s the faintest ghost of humor in her voice.
It’s nothing. A scrap of dry wit. It’s not much. But it’s enough to make breathing easier.
“Yeah.”
She looks around the apartment. Takes in the blank walls, the empty surfaces, the complete absence of anything that suggests a human being lives here.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I need.”
But her hands are still tapping that anxious rhythm.
“What did you do before?” I ask. “When you were stressed. Before all this.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Something crosses her face, memory or longing or both.
“I baked.”
Of course she did.
“What do you need to bake?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Everything. The kitchen doesn’t have anything.”
“Make me a list.”
“Saul, you don’t have to.”
“Make me a list,” I repeat. “I’ll get it.”
The grocery store is twenty-three minutes away. I know because I count. And also because it gives me twenty-three minutes to wonder what the hell I’m doing.
This isn’t in my job description. Witness protection means keeping her safe, keeping her hidden, making sure she has the resources to build a new life.
It doesn’t mean buying baking supplies because she looked lost in her own kitchen.
But I keep driving anyway.
The store’s one of those massive suburban warehouses, the kind with fluorescent lighting and too many choices and aisles that seem to go on forever.
I find the baking section and stop.
Flour. There are at least fifteen different kinds of flour. All-purpose, bread flour, cake flour, pastry flour, whole wheat, gluten-free, organic, unbleached. I stare at them like they might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense.
I pick up the all-purpose. Put it back. Pick up the unbleached. Read the back of the bag like it’s going to tell me which one Stevie would want.
This is ridiculous. I’ve disarmed men twice my size. I’ve talked witnesses down from panic attacks, relocated families across the country, testified in federal court without breaking a sweat.
And I’m standing in a grocery store paralyzed by flour.
