"Nervous," Ren said. "Won't admit it, but she is."
"Friday, right? The surgery?"
"Friday." Ren managed a small smile. "How's the little one doing in there?"
"Kicking like she's already got somewhere to be." Norah laughed, soft and warm, and rubbed a slow circle over her stomach. "David wants to name her after his grandmother. I keep telling him Mildred is not making a comeback, no matter how much he loves that woman."
"I don't know," Ren said. "Mildred's got a certain something."
"You're no help at all," Norah said, grinning, and turned back around as the bus rolled on.
And for a few minutes, the world outside the window was just ordinary. Telephone poles, a dog on a porch, a man mowing his lawn in the last light of the afternoon.
It was, Ren would think much later, one of the last ordinary afternoons any of them would have for a while.
And then, just past the edge of town, the bus passed a building Ren had seen a hundred times before but never really looked at.
A squat two-story structure, brick gone gray with weather, windows boarded on the second floor. A faded sign still hung above the door, the paint peeling, but the letters just barely legible.
Colton Properties. Leasing Office. Established 1988.
Ren's eyes lingered on it a moment longer than they needed to. She didn't know why. There was no reason a leasing office should mean anything to her.
Colton was a common enough name in a town this size, and half the buildings on Main Street probably had some connection to it. The way half the buildings in any small town belonged, eventually, to whoever had the most money and the least patience for anyone poorer than them.
But something about the sign caught in her chest like a splinter she couldn't quite locate.
For just a moment, the bus window seemed to fall away, and she was somewhere else entirely.
A cargo hold. Dim red light. The smell of jet fuel and salt air.
Danny Ruiz, 26 years old, cross-legged on the floor with his gear half-packed around him, telling her for the third time that week about an apartment his family had lost back home when he was a kid. Some landlord, some letter, some cardboard boxes on a curb in the rain.
He never said it like it was a sad story. He said it like it was the reason he'd signed up in the first place. The thing that had put a floor under him when the rest of his life had none.
"Everybody's got a reason," he'd said, grinning that easy grin of his. "That's mine. Somebody took the ground out from under my family once. I decided I'd rather be the ground for somebody else."
Ren blinked, and the memory folded itself back down into whatever quiet place she kept it. And the bus window was just a bus window again, the leasing office sliding past and out of view behind a stand of bare trees.
She didn't know why Danny's voice had surfaced right then, right there, looking at a faded real estate sign in a town he'd never even heard of.