He hitched up his duffel on his shoulder and walked across the platform, avoiding looking toward the Mickelson family reunion. He pulled open the heavy door of the depot. His chest hurt at the thought of being so close to her and then turning around, but he had to remind himself that she had played him for a fool to begin with. He thought a hundred dollars was a small price to pay to avoid making even more of an idiot of himself.

The diamond ring felt hot in his pocket, but there was little other heat in the empty, dim depot; Nick could see his breath when he exhaled. An orange glow was visible in the wood-burning stove at the center of the waiting area, where the wooden benches looked like church pews, but the stove wasn’t throwing off much heat. Nick hoped he wouldn’t have to wait long for a southbound train, and castigated himself again for not going directly home to his mother and his feather bed in Dover.

The ticket agent was absent from his window, and Nick smelled hamburger more strongly now, the scent emanating from the brightly lit glassed-in lunchroom at the opposite end of the building, where he and Elissa and her father had eaten his first time in town. Maybe it was warmer in there, he thought, and besides that, he could get something to eat.

He walked as quickly as his wounded knee would allow across the coffee-colored wood floor, toward the light and heat of the lunchroom.

He sat down at the counter, dropping his duffel at his feet, and ordered a hamburger, fries, and coffee from the tall stoop-shouldered woman who asked if she could help him. She brought him the coffee first, then went back to the kitchen to cook his meal. No one else was in the lunchroom, and the woman’s hooded eyes spoke her fatigue.

But when she brought him his food, she leaned her angular limbs against her side of the counter, lit a cigarette, and said, “You don’t sound like you’re from around here, soldier.” Her voice was hoarse from fatigue or smoking. Her black hair showed several strands of gray, but she had probably been pretty when she was younger.

“No, ma’am,” he said. He picked up the big burger in both hands and sank his teeth in. It was good, and he relished it, leaning his elbows on the counter and holding the burger tilted up near his chin as he chewed.

She knocked the ash from her cigarette into an ashtray. “Where you headed, then?”

“Home,” he said, when he’d swallowed.

“Well, isn’t that nice.”

He smiled, and chomped off another section of his burger.