She had also quietly, without telling anyone, started propping her old phone against her purse most evenings, angled toward the front window where the parking lot sat just beyond the glass. It wasn’t much of a setup. The picture quality was middling at best, and she had no real plan for what she was recording, only a feeling, the kind that settles into a person after eighty-two years of watching how towns work, that it never hurts to have a record of things, just in case.
She hadn’t caught anything worth using yet. Just some footage of boys being loud and unkind in the parking lot after closing. Nothing that would hold up as real evidence of anything, but she kept the phone propped there anyway, evening after evening. The way a person waters a garden they aren’t sure will ever grow simply because it seems like the right thing to do. She didn’t tell Walter what she was doing. Not yet.
The following Tuesday brought the moment none of them saw coming. Though in hindsight, Walter would say later, it had been building for weeks, the way weather builds before anyone bothers to look up at the sky. Harold Puit had been feeling steadier that week, his cold finally clearing, well enough to return to his usual evening routine at the counter.
Seventy-five years old, a widower who’d lost his wife three years back and found in the rhythm of the diner something close enough to company. He walked with a slight limp these days, an old injury that flared up in cold weather. And he always parked close to the door, always needed a little extra time crossing the lot.
That Tuesday evening, he arrived just as Dalton, Reed, and Nolan were leaving. The three of them came barreling out the door, loud, laughing about something, not paying much attention to their surroundings. Dalton, walking backward to finish a joke he was telling Reed, didn’t see Harold until it was nearly too late.
He backed straight into him. Harold, already unsteady on the wet pavement, staggered sideways and went down hard, his hip catching the edge of the curb, his hand scraping against the rough concrete as he tried to catch himself. For a moment, nobody moved.
“Whoa, my bad, old man,” Dalton said, not even reaching down to help, already laughing again with Reed about something else entirely. “You got to watch where you’re standing.” Harold lay there a moment, stunned, pain shooting up through his wrist and hip. It was Josie walking up the sidewalk toward the diner at that exact moment who reached him first.
She dropped to her knees beside him without hesitation. “Sir, are you all right? Don’t try to move yet.” “I’m all right,” Harold said, though his voice was tight with pain. “Just knocked the wind out of me is all.” “Your wrist is bleeding,” Josie said gently, already pulling a clean tissue from her bag and pressing it carefully against the scrape. “Can you feel your hip? Any sharp pain?” “A little sore,” Harold admitted. “Nothing broken, I don’t think.”