"You realize you could have just let me find an ATM," she said once we had our coffee.
"I repair machines for a living. I don't enjoy losing arguments to them in my free time."
She smiled. It was a genuine, quick smile that reached her eyes before she had time to make it polite. "Then I'm glad the card reader broke."
We sat together for twenty minutes. Her name was Maria. She worked for the county, mostly in legal and administrative matters, and she seemed as interested in why MRI machines needed helium as I was in why she carried two phones. When I asked about the phones, she said one was for work and the other was for the small amount of life her work allowed her to have.
That seemed fair. I didn't ask for her entire resume, and she didn't ask why I was divorced. We agreed to have dinner instead.
Maria wasn't the kind of person who filled every silence because she was uncomfortable with it. She listened. She remembered details. If I told her that a particular hospital had an impossible parking garage, she'd ask the next week whether I had found a better entrance. If she disagreed with me, she explained why instead of making me guess what I had done wrong.
For someone newly accustomed to a house that was peacefully empty, that kind of attention was unsettling in the best possible way.
We took things slowly. Some weeks we only saw each other once. On others, she stayed over after a late evening and left before dawn for work. She drove a dark blue Ford F-150 that looked practical rather than fashionable. The cab was clean except for a collection of road maps and emergency preparedness supplies, and a county-style registration plate sat beneath the rear bumper.
I noticed the plate once and assumed the truck was part of some ordinary county fleet arrangement. Maria had said she worked for the county, after all. At the time, I was more interested in the way she laughed when I cooked dinner badly and insisted the result was still edible.
Six months into knowing her, I asked whether she wanted to leave a toothbrush in my upstairs bathroom. She said yes, but only if she could also replace the coffee maker that had been producing something she described as "slightly bitter radiator fluid."
We bought a new coffee maker the next weekend. It wasn't a dramatic declaration of love, but I remembered standing in the kitchen afterward and realizing I wanted her there.
Victoria, naturally, noticed the truck before she noticed anything else.
One Sunday morning, while Maria and I were carrying groceries inside, Victoria pulled up across the street in her white luxury SUV. She lowered the window and looked at the F-150 with visible distaste.
"Whose work vehicle is that?" she asked.
"A guest's," I said.
"We have standards for guest parking."
"It's entirely on my driveway."