A woman’s voice—more like a girl’s voice. It came from somewhere behind and to Danica’s left. The Jake Ryan lookalike turned, and Danica turned with him. The newcomer could not have been older than twenty-five, and she could’ve posed for any of the fashion magazines lining the rack above the conveyor. She had a plastic bottle of Midol in her hand. She crossed to the young man, reached past him to set the bottle next to his orange juice, then shut her eyes and leaned into him, seeming to block out the whole world beyond the shirt fabric covering his chest.

He kissed the top of her head and spoke softly. “You’ll feel better by the time we get home.”

The girl nodded against him. She put her arms around his waist and held on tightly. To Danica’s right, the cashier scanned the sixty-watt bulbs and stuffed them into a bag.

The parking lot was seventy degrees and heavy with a night mist that wasn’t quite fog. Beyond the lot’s edge the land dropped away in shallow steps to the Pacific, three miles west of Kroger. Spread out across the sloped terrain between them lay the western expanse of Brookings, Oregon, its pink-orange streetlights spectral in the haze. Danica liked seeing the town from up here at night. Working double shifts and getting her groceries at two in the morning was almost worth it for this view. Even now it was helping her mood—a little.

She angled to her car, at first hidden by a full-sized van someone had parked beside it. She popped the trunk and set the grocery bags inside. Twenty yards behind her she heard the store’s automatic door slide open—the young couple coming out. She finished stowing her things, pushed the empty cart to the corral two spaces away, and got back to her car just as the couple reached the van. There was an awkward instant when all three were clustered at the mouth of the channel between the vehicles. The young man, a pace ahead of the girl, halted and left the space open for Danica.

“You were first,” he said.

Danica thought of letting them go ahead anyway, then just shrugged. Losing three seconds wouldn’t ruin their night. She stepped past them, went to her door and put her key in the lock, and felt an explosion of pain beneath her ear as the man’s fist slammed into her neck.