The following Tuesday, Josie arrived at the diner just as the dinner rush was beginning to thin and found for the first time the stool at the end of the counter occupied. An older man sat there, a folded newspaper open to the crossword, a pencil tucked behind one ear. He looked to be in his seventies, silver-haired, with the kind of weathered patient face that made her think briefly of her own grandfather, though she’d never known him well enough to be certain of the comparison.
Walter introduced them without ceremony, the way small towns do. “Josie, this is Harold. Been coming in here longer than I’ve been running the place. Feels like some days.” Harold looked up over his reading glasses and smiled. The kind of smile that reached all the way to his eyes. “Pleasure,” he said. “Walter tells me you’re new around here.” “Three weeks now,” Josie said. “Still finding my way.”
“Takes about a semester,” Harold said. “Then one day you’ll walk past the old courthouse and realize you know exactly which way home is without even thinking about it. Sneaks up on you.” Josie smiled at that. “I hope so.” “You will,” Harold said, returning to his crossword. “This town’s smaller than it looks. Gives people plenty of chances to become part of it, whether they mean to or not.”
Josie didn’t think much of the comment at the time. She simply nodded, took her usual booth, and let the warmth of the diner settle around her the way it always did. She had no idea that evening how true Harold’s words would turn out to be, or how soon the two of them would be bound together by something neither of them could yet imagine.
The next four days passed quietly, the ordinary rhythm of freshman life settling over Josie the way it does for most new students eventually. Classes in the morning, the library in the afternoon, three floors up, a corner table by the window she’d claimed as her own. The Lantern most evenings, her booth waiting, Walter’s coffee pot never far behind.
She called her mother twice that week. Brief conversations mostly about nothing. The small comfortable details of a life continuing forward. Her mother asked about her classes. Josie asked about the garden, about the neighbors, about whether the old truck was still giving trouble in cold weather. Neither of them mentioned Dalton Reeve.
Josie hadn’t told her mother anything about the diner, about the napkin, about the low current of unease that had settled beneath her days since that first night. Her mother had enough weight of her own to carry, working double shifts to help cover the gap her father’s income used to fill. And Josie had made a quiet promise to herself, walking away from his funeral two years earlier, that she would never be one more thing her mother had to worry about.
It was a promise that would grow harder to keep as the weeks went on. But for now, in the quiet in-between of late September, it was a promise she managed to hold. On Friday evening, Josie walked back to the Lantern earlier than usual, a break between classes leaving her with a free hour and an appetite she hadn’t expected.