Read the opening chapters of Da Capo.

one.

The hotel looks like it took its last guest sometime before I was born, and it’s been coasting on the memory ever since.

Which is fine by me. After that much interstate, I’d have checked into worse. I’d have checked into a drainpipe if it held still.

It's all browns in here, the tired kind: brown paneling on the walls with the grain printed on; a brown-and-orange carpet worn to the backing along the path from the door to the desk, where a thousand feet have walked the color right out of it. The sofa's got a sag in the middle like somebody died there and was in no hurry to leave. There's a rubber plant in the corner doing a real committed impression of having lost the will to live, its leaves gone dusty and pale.

A wire rack of brochures by the window, curling at the corners: glass-bottom boats, a cavern tour, some water park, all of it faded to the same washed-out blue by however many years in that window. And over the whole room that fluorescent light, the kind that gets into a woman's face and starts quietly adding years, none of them the ones she'd pick.

"Charming," I say. "You take me to the nicest places."

He doesn't answer, which is fair. I wouldn't dignify it either.

I try to think of the name of the town and it just isn't there. Some exit off the highway. A water tower I half-remember, pale against the dark. It'll come to me.

That’s how names are, you chase them and they hide, look away and they wander back on their own.

Doesn't matter anyway. One night, then the road.

There's a bell on the counter, the little silver dome kind, worn bright on top where people slap it. Sign underneath in a font trying way too hard.

Ring for Service. So I ring for service.

Takes a while. It always takes a while in these places. The night man's in back with something that has a laugh track, and you're an interruption, not a customer.

Behind the desk there's a little rack of blank white keycards and a stack of the paper sleeves they go in, a boxy encoder machine beside it with one red light on. A calendar two months behind. A corkboard full of takeout menus and business cards, every one of them lifting at the corners like they’ve been waiting years for somebody to call.

Then a door opens and here he comes, wiping his hands on a paper towel, and I give him the once-over, mostly because my eyes need something to do.

Older. Polo buttoned all the way up to the neck. Hair combed wet and parted like he did it with a ruler and a level. Not ugly, not anything. One of those faces that won't stick, the kind you could look at all night and still not be able to hand to a cop.

"Evening," he says, and smiles, and the smile's a beat too glad.

"One room. Just tonight."

"Just tonight." He says it like I've told him something intimate. Wakes up a computer that groans about it and starts hunting the keyboard a finger at a time, peck, peck, the monitor light flickering green across his face. "Long drive?"

"Long enough." Though when I reach for how long, exactly, I get a sunrise and then a lot of road and then standing right here, and not much in between.

That's just driving, though. The hours run together, the white line does something to your head, everybody knows that. You lose a little time. It's nothing.

"Pretty girl like you shouldn't have to drive it alone."

And there it is. I almost laugh, because the nerve, running a line like that with my whole situation sitting on the sofa right there behind me. Some men would flirt at a funeral.

I don't answer. I just slide my ID across the counter and let him make of it what he wants.

He picks it up in both hands, holds it to the lamp, glances from the little photo to my face and back. Making sure I’m me.

Then he sets my ID down and slides it back. Something in his face has cooled a half-degree, the glad gone out of the smile without the smile actually leaving, the look of a man who's decided to stop chatting and just do the job.

Suits me.

He takes a blank keycard from the rack behind him and slots it into the little encoder. The red light blinks. He pulls the card free, slips it into one of the paper sleeves, writes something on the front, and slides it over.

"Room 117," he says. "Ground floor, round the side. Quiet end."

"Great. Two keys, though." The manners on this guy. Hasn't so much as nodded at him. I tip my head toward the sofa without looking. "He'll want his own."

The clerk's hands go still on the keyboard.

"I'm sorry?" He follows my nod, then comes back to me, and his face isn't strange, isn't anything, just honestly confused, a guy trying to catch a joke he missed. "It's—just you, ma'am."

I turn to point him out, to show him the man I've been traveling with all day—

Sofa. Dead plant. The rack of curling brochures. And the black window behind it all, the parking lot floating in the glass, and my reflection caught among the cars, one arm still half-lifted toward nothing at all.

The fluorescents hum. In back, the laugh track finds something funny.

My hand comes down. The heat crawls up my neck slow and awful, the whole-body blush of a woman who's been caught in a lie, except I couldn't tell you what the lie was.

He stepped out, that's all. To the car, for a smoke, whatever. You turn around and a man's wandered off and you're standing there talking to the air. It happens. It's the most normal thing in the world.

"Right," I hear myself say. Light. Easy. Somebody else's voice wearing my mouth. "He's in the car. He stayed in the car."

The clerk nods, slow, and says nothing, and that's worse than anything he could've said.

I take the one key off the counter and walk out without hurrying, because unhurried is what you do when everything's fine, and everything's fine.

two.

Outside, the cold's a shock after the stale warm lobby, and I stop for a second to let my eyes adjust and my head catch up.

The sky's doing something gorgeous and violent over the interstate, the last of the sun bleeding up into the underside of the clouds, violet going to bruise, the color you only get for about four minutes before the dark takes it.

I watch my breath come out pale and drift off. Somewhere a truck downshifts on the on-ramp, that long falling growl, and then nothing.

How long have I been driving?

The question just surfaces, calm as you like, and I turn it over and can't find the bottom of it. A day. It couldn't be more than a day. But the day doesn't have any edges when I go looking for them. It’s all soft in the middle, like a dream an hour after you've had it, still there but gone runny, the details sliding off when you try to set them down.

Sunrise on the highway. The dash clock. Radio voices coming and going under the static. My hands on the wheel, knuckles white, though I couldn't tell you what I was gripping so hard about.

And him in the seat beside me, one arm out the window, his face gold in that early light.

That part comes back so clear it puts an ache in my throat. The line of his jaw. The easy shape of him.

What was his name again.

It's right there. It's the town-name thing all over again, sitting just off the edge of the tongue, and I know if I stop clawing at it it'll come strolling back on its own.

Names do that. It's fine.

I press two fingers to my temple where a dull ache has set up shop and breathe through it and let it be fine.

Smoke on the air then, hickory, charcoal, meat going low and slow somewhere close. My stomach turns over so hard and sudden it's almost a cramp.

When did I eat last. I reach for that too and get the same soft nothing, so I stop reaching, because a girl could go crazy poking at every little gap, and anyway there's the answer to the smoke right across the road: a bar throwing warm orange light out onto the wet blacktop, neon in the window, the good kind of noise leaking out under the door. Food. Something hot, something real, something I can put in my hands and be sure of.

"Begin again, at the end. One beginning after another."

My head whips around.

There's a man down on a patch of dead grass by the road, folded up small, hood pulled so far forward his face is just shadow. Rocking. Slow and even, forward and back, like a metronome nobody wound and nobody can stop.

"Begin again, at the end. One beginning after another."

Same words, same flat little tune, looping.

Not to me. Not to anybody. Just out into the dark on repeat.

My hand's already in my purse, fingers closing on the keys, thumb finding the button on its own. Across the lot the Civic answers, two red blinks. It’s stupid how much better that makes me feel, a car saying yes, hello, over here, like something in the world still knows my name even if I don't.

I go to it quick, my rubber soles slapping the pavement. Behind me the hotel sign buzzes and stutters and comes on all at once. Half of it's dead, the O gone, the T gone, so what burns red against the night is H, E, L, and I give it one second more than it deserves before deciding it’s funny.

At the car I put my hand to the cold glass and lean in and look.

Empty. Front seats, nothing. He's not waiting in the car after all. He stepped out. He stepped… somewhere. My eyes go to the back and catch on my own backpack slumped in the footwell where I threw it. Change of clothes, toothbrush, the little nothing you bring for one night on the road.

That's mine. I know that's mine.

So what's in the trunk?

The thought lands with a strange soft weight, like a hand set on my shoulder from behind, and I don't have an answer for it, and I don't especially want to go find one. Not with my stomach eating itself and the cold in my teeth and that man down there still going, still rocking, his voice threading through everything now like a wire.

"Begin again, at the end."

I turn my back on the car and the trunk and the whole cold question of it, and I cross the road toward the light, toward the smoke and the noise and the promise of something warm.

Because that, at least, I understand.

three.

The first swallow of the beer is so good it's almost embarrassing.

Cold and bitter and clean, and I shut my eyes and let it go down and feel the warmth spread through my chest, and for about one whole second everything in me goes quiet.

Then the second passes and the quiet with it, and the weight settles back where it lives, low and patient, and the beer hasn't touched it at all.

My legs pick that moment to go, a little tremble in the knees, and I get myself onto the nearest stool before they can make a scene about it. Slow breath. Another.

You're fine. I open my eyes.

It's a good bar, or a good enough one, dim and loud and alive: a pool table going in back with the crack of the break and a laugh riding up over it, a football game nobody's watching flickering on a TV bolted in the corner, baskets of wings, beer signs buzzing pink and blue. The bartender gives me a nod that's already leaving, back to the game before it lands.

Nobody looking at me. Nobody looking twice. See? Normal. Just a girl having a drink.

I catch myself in the mirror behind the bottles and tuck a loose piece of brown hair back, and… okay. Not bad, actually. White tank, jean shorts, the canvas slip-ons. All of it neat, all of it clean. I look normal. Cute, even.

I just don't feel it.

"Don't worry, you look great."

The voice comes from right at my elbow and I jump, actually jump, before I can stop myself, and there he is, leaned against the bar like he's been there the whole time, elbows back on the wood, head down, looking at nothing in particular.

Him.

"I was wondering where you'd run off to." It comes out on a laugh, light, easy, and I don't examine it, the same way you don't examine good luck.

He wandered off, he wandered back. That's men. That's this one, anyway.

My eyes go over him without asking my permission: the faded shirt pulled tight across his shoulders, the slouch of his hips in worn denim, three days of stubble shadowing his jaw.

He's stupid handsome. That part I'm sure of. That part I'd testify to.

But it's more than the handsome. It's like he's the only thing in here in real focus. Everything else, the bar, the game, the crack of the pool break, has lost its definition, half a step out of true, and he's standing in the middle of it sharp, like the world's a photograph and he's the part they got right.

He rakes a hand back through his blond hair and blows out a breath. "Told you. You're stuck with me from here on out."

"At least till we finish the job." I tip the last of the beer back and set the glass down soft.

He watches me do it, and something in his face changes. "And you still don't know who hired you. Not even a name."

The tension pulls tight under my ribs again and I shift on the stool, angle myself toward the room, let it wash in to cover it: the pool break, the laugh, plates going by, the game throwing its light across a dozen faces that aren't looking at me. Everything running at a speed I can't quite match, like the whole place is on the beat and I keep coming in just behind it.

"I'm supposed to take the car to San Francisco," I say finally, slow, because it's the one solid thing I've got. "That's all I know."

"Come on." His eyes narrow, not unkind. "There's got to be more than that. Think."

Something moves at the edge of my sight, one of the pool players leaning on his cue, watching me across the room. I look away fast, back to my companion, and summon something like a smile.

"I can't even remember your name," I tell him, and it comes out smaller than I meant, almost shy, like I'm admitting something shameful.

His head tilts. Those eyes come around onto me and hold, steady, blue as anything, as if keeping them on me might hold the pieces of me in place.

And something breaks the surface.

I'm moving over him where he lies sleeping, my hand closing on his shoulder. He wakes and turns and looks up at me with those eyes—

Then it's gone, back under, and only the ache of it left behind.

"Chris," he says, quiet. "My name's Chris."

It settles into me like a key into a lock, like something I've always had and misplaced for a minute, and I don't know why my eyes sting, and I don't ask.

Chris. Of course it is.

WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

She finally remembers his name.
Chris.

For a moment, one missing piece clicks into place.

The rest of the night won’t be nearly so simple.

Continue Da Capo and follow the road wherever it leads.