“I’ll be right there. Go back to the car.”

I don’t go back to the car, but I do tiptoe out from behind the building and stand at the side of the road. There are flashing lights—a police officer and a tow truck. Oh lord, I’m going to jail.

Someone spots me and points, and my instinct is to crouch down. There’s nothing to hide behind, so I’m crouching for no reason whatsoever. Forget jail. I’m getting a padded cell.

Out of habit, I’m scouring the road for a flash of gold Maserati, so when Nicholas steps out of a Jeep it takes me a second to recalibrate.

“Nicholas!” I hiss in a loud whisper. It’s no use. I’m drowned out by the commotion of cars whooshing by. I wave my arms like an air traffic controller. He doesn’t see me, striding straight into the heart of the chaos to take charge.

He checks over the abandoned vehicle and shakes his head to himself, seizing my purse from the passenger seat before shutting the driver’s-side door. Holy cow, I left my purse.

Men in uniforms converge on him. I hide my face behind my hands from a safe distance, not wanting to overhear what is sure to be a humiliating story of my stop-and-run. Someone nods in my direction and Nicholas whirls to face me. Even from this far, I discern the odd glint in his eyes and read his mind like it’s typed in a thought bubble over his head.

Well, well, well. How are we feeling about our choices now, Naomi?

Not good, is how I’m feeling. But at least I’m standing on the less policeman-y side of the road.

He says something to the officer, who looks at me, too. Identity confirmed. I’m leaving here in handcuffs, which will tidily accomplish my goal of getting Mrs. Rose to catapult me out of the family tree.

Nicholas calls somebody on his phone and chats for a minute before handing the phone to the officer. They chat for a minute, too; all the while, Nicholas is just looking and looking at me, and there’s nowhere to hide from him. He’s my only ally. He’s my worst enemy.

He’s walking across the road right toward me, wearing the coat I call his Sherlock Holmes coat. It was expensive and the nicest gift I’ve ever gotten him. He wears it from the very beginning of autumn until the very end of spring, with a scarf looped beneath the wide collar. The fact that he hasn’t burned it yet and danced around its ashes seems aggressively kind in my current frame of mind.

His face isn’t grim or smug, but neutral save for the tiny crease between his eyebrows. Concern.

“What happened?” he asks when he approaches.

I shake my head. I can’t talk about it. I’m already pretending this never happened. “Am I going to jail?”

“No.” He looks down at my purse in his grip. “Do you need to grab anything out of the car?”

“No.”

He wants to ask more questions, I can tell. Nicholas gives me a long, searching look, then removes his coat and puts it around my shoulders. His fingers play with the top button, as if to fasten it, but he lets his hand fall.

He steers me to the Jeep without another word. I break into a speed-walk when we pass the police car and tow truck, half waiting for somebody to reach out and snatch me. After I dart a paranoid peek over my shoulder for the umpteenth time, Nicholas smirks. “Relax.”

The single word unlocks the deadbolt on my ability to form coherent speech. “Is Leon going to be in trouble? I haven’t gotten the title switched yet. What’s going to happen to the car? It’s not actually broken down.”

“Of course not. If it were broken down, you’d just fix it yourself,” he says, giving me a sly sideways look.

“Uh.”

“Or maybe not. Wouldn’t want Dave from Morris Auto to start missing you.” He observes my stricken face and turns away so that I don’t see his smile, but I still hear it in his voice. “When Dave had his wisdom teeth removed, the first thing he said when coming out of anesthesia was ‘Don’t tell the dentist about Naomi’s car.’” He pauses to let it sink in that I’ve been had, and my chagrin threatens to shrivel me up into a pocket-sized Naomi. Dave’s really going to hear it from me the next time I get a Rate our service! email from Morris Auto. “Anyway, a tow company’s taking the car home for us. I could drive it myself and let you take the Jeep, but you look a little shaken up.”

My mouth is dry. “It’s a stick shift.”

“I know. I can drive a stick shift.”

The world tilts. “What? Really?”

“Mm-hmm.” The amusement is faint, but it’s there.

I slide into the passenger seat and lock my door to keep out any cops who might change their minds last-minute. “I miss heated seats.”

“I thought you hated the Maserati.”

“I do. Did. Loved the heated seats, though. Just like—”

“Sitting in the devil’s lap,” he says before I can finish, sliding an arm behind my headrest as he turns to check the rear and backs out. He’s so close, I can smell his aftershave, and my heart pangs with an emotion like homesickness. It’s not the same aftershave he’s been wearing lately. It’s Stetson, which I gave to him as a Christmas present. Wrapped in gold foil paper he kept for so long, I can still hear the crinkling.

I love it, he’d said with a big grin. The scent of Stetson will forever link directly to the memory of that grin, and the adoration I’d felt for him. What if someone I date in the future wears Stetson, and I have to think about Nicholas and his grin every time I look at another man’s face? He’s invaded so many of my levels, there’s no getting rid of him.

Later, after he opened his present, I saw the sort of grooming products he kept in his medicine cabinet and blushed at how nice and expensive they were. The price of his cologne rendered my gift an embarrassment. But he wore the Stetson every day from then on, even when his grin faded and our relationship transitioned from Before to After. He used up every last drop and didn’t throw away the bottle.

“Did you get to finish eating?” I ask timidly.

“We’d literally just gotten seated when I texted to ask where you were. They lost our reservation and Mom went ballistic. Made the manager cry.”

I can imagine. Deborah Rose has never exited any establishment without introducing herself to the manager.

“What’d you tell your mom?”

“That you were having car trouble and I needed to go pick you up.”