"Oh my God. You have got to be kidding me." The voice crossed the driveway outside Hawthorne Automotive Group's Manhattan headquarters just as Ethan Cole shut the door of his old pickup truck.
He recognized Vanessa Reed before he turned around, although nearly two years had passed since he had last heard her speak to him without an audience.
Her heels struck the concrete with a deliberate rhythm, and the two employees walking beside her slowed to watch. Ethan tucked the keys into the pocket of his faded brown jacket and waited, already knowing that whatever she had to say would not be quiet.
"Ethan Cole," Vanessa said, looking from his face to the dented front fender. "You're still driving that disgusting thing?" The truck was a weathered dark-blue Ford with a repaired tailgate, a shallow scrape along the passenger door, and an old set of work gloves on the dashboard. It was clean, mechanically sound, and so familiar to Ethan that he could tell which door had opened by the sound of its hinges. Vanessa looked at it as though its presence offended the building behind her.
"Good morning, Vanessa," he said.
"Don't good-morning me. You parked that scrap of metal in front of my office?" She turned toward the younger woman at her side, inviting her to appreciate the joke before she continued. "Look at him, Olivia. Same jacket, same miserable truck, same expression like the world owes him patience." Ethan neither laughed nor defended himself, and the absence of an argument seemed to irritate her further.
"It's a public visitor space," Ethan answered. "I'll be leaving it there only as long as I need to."
Vanessa gave a short, unbelieving laugh. "You haven't changed at all. Neither you nor that truck."
She surveyed his boots, the inexpensive watch, and the folder tucked beneath his arm. "Tell me something, Ethan. Is that truck your greatest achievement in life? Because if it is, I'm embarrassed I ever dated you."
The third person in the group, a young man with an employee identification lanyard, looked abruptly toward the doors. Olivia Grant, the younger woman beside Vanessa, did not join the laughter. Ethan noticed that, just as he noticed the security guard across the drive watching the interaction through the lobby glass. He could have ended it with a name, a document, or a telephone call, but those were precisely the things he had come to observe without revealing. He did not need another demonstration of how differently some people behaved after learning who held the money.
"I hope your morning improves," he said, and stepped around her.
"Some people never learn their place," Vanessa called after him.
Ethan stopped beside the hood of the truck and looked back at her. His expression was not angry, and that made his reply sound almost gentle. "You're about to learn something, too, Vanessa." Then he walked toward the lobby, leaving her with an audience that no longer seemed quite as entertained.