Her shoulders were bare, and the night air had followed her in. I watched her suppress a shiver she probably didn't want me to see.
"Sit down," I said. "I'll get you something warm."
She looked at the couch like she was calculating whether she trusted it, then sat on the edge of it with the dress billowing up around her. I went to the kitchen and poured coffee from the pot I'd made an hour ago and added a pour of the whiskey that Bishop had left in the cabinet—the good kind, because Bishop didn't keep bad whiskey—and brought it back to her.
She took it with both hands. Didn't question it.
I sat in the chair across from her and waited.
It took a minute. She stared into the mug, and I watched her decide something. Watched the jaw unclench just slightly. And then she talked.
The groom's name was Dane. He hadn't shown up to the church. She'd waited two hours before a text came—go to this address, I'll explain everything—and she'd driven three hours in the dress because she needed to understand what had happened and she didn't have anywhere else to go. She said that last part without inflection, like it was just geography.
I didn't let anything show on my face. She told me the address he'd sent her was this address, and it was clear she was still trying to make sense of that.
She tried his phone twice more while she was talking. Both times, it went straight to voicemail.
I kept my hands loose on my knees and my mouth shut, and I let her get to the end of it. The fury was there—I could feel it sitting at the back of my throat, hot and specific, the particular kind that came from recognizing a pattern even when you were only hearing the outline of it. A man who didn't show, a phonethat went straight to voicemail, an address sent like a gift. None of that was accident.
But the fury wasn't mine to put in the room. She wasn't here for my anger. She'd brought enough of her own.
When she finished, she looked up at me like she was waiting for a verdict.
"He sent you here on purpose," I said.
"Apparently."
"His phone hasn't rung once. Goes straight to voicemail every time."
"Yes."
I nodded. "He planned this."
She looked back at the mug. "I know."
She'd known for a while, I thought. The way she said it wasn't the sound of someone hearing a hard thing for the first time. It was the sound of someone finally letting it be said out loud.
"Okay," I said. "You're not driving back tonight."
She started to say something, and I cut it off before it got going.
"It's late. You don't know these roads. You stay here, and we figure out the rest in the morning."
She looked at me for a moment. Not suspicious exactly. More like she was trying to locate the angle and couldn't find one.
"I don't even know your name," she said.
"Hayes."
"Pandora," she said.
I nodded like that settled it. Because it did.
I went to the bedroom and pulled a flannel shirt from my bag, along with a pair of drawstring sweats. I brought them back out and set them on the arm of the couch without ceremony.
"Bathroom's through there. Take your time."
She looked at the clothes, then back at me. Something moved across her face that I didn't try to name.