The first thing Evelyn Hartwell noticed about the man in the olive jacket was that he was not looking at her watch.
Everyone else had been looking at her watch all day, from the assistant who reminded her that the donors would arrive at seven to the hotel manager who called three times to ask when she would be back.
But the stranger kneeling beside her stalled station wagon in a Vermont shopping plaza was looking at the battery terminals with the concentration of a man who understood that some problems could not be solved by telling them how important you were. Snow gathered in the curls of his brown hair, melted along the collar of his sherpa-lined jacket, and dripped from the jumper cables he held in his bare hands.
"Please," Evelyn said, glancing at the gold watch on her wrist in spite of herself. "Just start it. I'm late for the gala. The man looked up, not irritated so much as tired in a way that seemed older than his face.
"Gala, huh?" he said, fitting the first red clamp over the positive terminal. "My girl's never seen a ballroom. He nodded toward a faded red pickup parked two spaces away, where a little girl wearing a crooked Santa hat had pressed her face against the passenger window until her breath made a silver cloud on the glass.
For reasons Evelyn could not have explained, the girl's bright eyes stopped the clock inside her head. "What's her name?" she asked. "Hope," the man said, and something in the way he spoke the word made it sound less like a name than a promise he was working very hard to keep. He connected the final cable, checked the clamps, and signaled for Evelyn to turn the key. The engine coughed twice, shuddered, and came alive beneath a thin curtain of falling snow.
"There you go," he said, closing his hands around the cables as though the work had been nothing. He glanced toward his daughter again. "She'd love the lights. Evelyn looked through the windshield at the little girl, then down at the gilded invitations protruding from her open leather handbag.
She took one, wrote on its back in blue ink, and held it out to the stranger with a decisiveness that startled even her. "Bring Hope," she said. "Table one. Trust me."
The man did not take the card right away. His gaze moved from Evelyn's beautifully tailored navy coat to the embossed invitation and finally to the old red truck where his daughter was making a snow angel against the fogged glass with one mittened hand. He looked like someone standing before an unlocked door in a house where he had spent his whole life being told not to enter. The woman placed the invitation in his palm, closed his fingers gently around it, and said, "My name is Evelyn. If anyone asks, tell them I invited you myself."
Three hours earlier, Ethan Walker had been under a service truck with snow melting into his collar and a payment reminder folded in the pocket nearest his heart. He was thirty-seven, broad through the shoulders from a lifetime of carrying things that could not be carried with one hand, with curly brown