"So am I," Noah answered. Their shoulders almost touched, and he felt the warmth of a possibility he had not dared to imagine for a long time. Emma turned toward him. "Can I ask you something personal?"
"You can ask," he replied. "Why do you drive a taxi?" The question was so direct that Noah could not hide behind humor. He looked across the river, where offices stayed brightly lit long after anyone outside them had a reason to be awake.
"I wanted to meet people without having to impress them," he said. Emma frowned. "Impress them with what?" He took a breath. "With things that don't matter as much as people think."
"Like money?" she asked. He nodded, and his silence encouraged her to continue. "I suppose it would be nice to have enough that no one at home had to worry about rent, but beyond that I don't know what I'd want it for."
"Sometimes when people know you have money, every conversation changes," Noah said. "People want favors before they know what sort of person you are. Or they decide they already know, and you spend the rest of the evening trying to contradict the story." Emma listened without interrupting.
"That sounds lonely," she said. Noah looked at her, surprised again by her willingness to imagine another person's difficult feelings without measuring whether they were reasonable. "It can be," he admitted. She nudged his elbow lightly. "Well, you don't have to impress me. I already know your coffee recommendations are terrible."
He laughed, then fell quiet as her hand slipped back to the railing. The truth stood between them now like a door he could open with a single sentence. He almost said that he did not merely have money, that the entire structure of his adult life would make hers look different by comparison. But he saw the relief in her face when she spoke to him as an equal, and he told himself he could wait one more day.
By then Victor Hail's attorneys had received formal notice that Reed Global was suspending its proposed financing pending review. Victor called Daniel repeatedly, demanded to speak to Noah, and threatened to sue for the cost of lost opportunities. Each call left Daniel more concerned, not about the threats themselves but about the haste with which Victor wanted documents signed. He had begun to suspect the developer's urgency had little to do with a competing bidder.
Noah returned to Carter's Corner the following morning and discovered Emma waiting outside with two cups of coffee. She handed him one and leaned against the taxi. "You really should stop taking business calls outside my mother's diner," she said. Noah glanced at his phone, where Daniel's name had appeared three times in ten minutes.
"Why?" he asked. Emma smiled, but her eyes were watchful. "You look like a man who's about to buy the entire street." Noah attempted a harmless expression. "I can barely afford fuel for this taxi."
"That's a terrible lie," Emma said, laughing. "See? You're not as good at hiding things as you think." Noah smiled with her, but something cold turned in his stomach, because the joke had landed too close to the truth. The disclosure he had postponed was becoming less a difficult conversation than a debt gathering interest.