Their laughter faded as Olivia stopped beside Tony and stuck out her hand. “Hello. I’m Olivia Han. Chase tells me there was a problem. That she was disrespected in your store.”

The manager looked over at Chase and then looked at the magazine that still sat at the end of the checkout counter. “Is that really her?”

Olivia narrowed her eyes. “That isn’t relevant. What is at this moment is why she left without procuring the groceries we need and why you as a manager allowed a woman patronizing your store to leave without”—Olivia glanced up at the motto on the store’s front wall—“satisfaction.”

The asshole guy snickered.

Olivia turned toward him like a weapon repositioning on a target. “Do you have something to say?”

The dude shrugged. “Just that whoever that girl is, she has a dirty mouth and can’t seem to do basic math. But what do you expect from a drug addict?”

His words were tiny stinging darts, and Chase felt the tears prick at her eyes again. Why did she care what that loser thought of her? He wore a Hawaiian shirt, saggy shorts, and sandals that revealed yellowing toenails. Probably hadn’t been laid since Bush was president. So gross. Yet his censure battered her ego.

Olivia pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of the manager. Then of the man standing at the checkout.

“What are you doing?” Tony asked, alarmed. “Hey, you can’t take our pictures like that.”

“I can if there has been harassment of a customer. I only have a little over two hundred thousand followers on Twitter, but they may want to hear how this store allows other customers to behave disrespectfully to women, and how the store manager—I’m assuming you’re the store manager, Tony—doesn’t care about how his shoppers are treated. How many followers do you have, Chase?”

“Uh, maybe almost a million?”

“I’ll share this picture with you. We’ll come up with a clever hashtag about how Tony lets people be verbally assaulted in his store. What do you think? Something that goes with Sav-A-Bunch . . .”

“Now wait a minute,” Tony said, holding up a beefy hand. “That’s not true. We didn’t allow anything to happen. She got mad and walked out.”

Olivia hooked her eyebrow, looking cold as shit. “What recourse does a woman have when she is being bullied?”

Something warm bloomed inside Chase. For a moment she envisioned her and Olivia as Thelma and Louise. They weren’t going to take shit off anyone. Or maybe Olivia wasn’t. Chase had sort of allowed Tony, Lisa, and the asshole extraordinaire to chase her from the store. But Olivia had her back. That felt good.

Needless to say, five minutes later, she and Olivia loaded the groceries into the car. Tony had even thrown in the pizza rolls as a gesture of good faith.