I made a quick dinner that consisted of an apple and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, then walked out the door. It took an hour to find the Starbucks, and when I got there, I was somewhat giddy to walk in and see Carolyn, the girl who had held a firm grasp on my mind all day.

There were two baristas, a man and a woman. The woman was not Carolyn. There was no line. Half the tables were occupied. I walked to the counter.

“Is Carolyn Reyug working?”

“Yes, she is,” the woman replied and looked to the back. “Let me go grab her.”

“Thank you.”

I waited at the counter, the anticipation making me a little nervous. Then Carolyn appeared. Her face lit up and I smiled at her. She came around the counter, holding her head at an obvious angle. I didn’t know why until she was a few feet away. On her cheek, just below her left eye, a bruise had started to form.

“Hey you,” she said and hugged me.

“How are you?”

“I’m good.”

She pulled away and I was able to see just how bad the bruise really was. An inch long and wide, a deep purple starting at the lower eyelid and turning a yellowish hue as it rolled down her cheek. There was little doubt in my mind as to how it had gotten there. I simply stared, feeling myself tense up. She made an apologetic face.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I pulled her back into my arms, my right hand cupping the back of her head. “Don’t be sorry.” I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten trying to dispel the rage. My first impulse was to kill the son of a bitch. “Are you able to sit a few minutes?”

“Yeah, I can take a short break. Did you want a drink first?”

I sat in the corner as far away from the others as I could get. Carolyn made a latte and brought it over and sat across from me. I smiled and tried to show her I wasn’t angry, though beneath the smile, I wanted to rip Jimmy’s throat out.

“So what happened?”

She talked in circles. I had to calm her down to get to the heart of the story. She went home to get her things in order to come straight to my place after work. She didn’t think he’d be there, but he was. He’d been drinking. He asked her where she had been. She told him it was none of his business. He threw a beer bottle at her but it missed and shattered against the wall. He ran over, grabbed her by the arms and shook her, kept repeating “Where have you been?” When she wouldn’t answer he slugged her in the eye and she fled the apartment and came straight to work without getting any of the items she had gone for.