As she shrugged out of her all-purpose raincoat, she hoped she wasn’t sending him the wrong message. But he seemed like a decent guy. What could it hurt?

He checked both their coats, then signaled to the majtre d’ who led them through the half-full dining area to a rear corner.

Unable to think of anything else, she said, “This is nice.”

“You’ve never been here?”

She shook her head. “I usually eat lunch at my desk, and at home it’s whatever I can whip up quick and easy. I don’t eat out much.” Because I don’t like to sit alone at a restaurant table.

He frowned. “I just realized I should have checked first if you like garlic. If you don’t, we’d better find another place.”

“I love garlic. But Mexican food isn’t very—”

“This isn’t Mexican. It’s Spanish.”

Alicia winced. “Of course. El Quijote. I should have known. It’s just that after all those years in Southern California, any restaurant with an ‘El’ is automatically Mexican.”

“‘All those years?’ I thought you were a New Yorker.”

“I was. And am again. Born and raised. But at eighteen I left for USC and stayed away for a dozen years.”

She didn’t tell him that she’d looked into the University of Hawaii because it was the farthest she could get from New York and that house on Thirty-eighth Street and still be in the United States. But USC had offered her a better financial package, so she’d settled for California.

The waiter arrived.

“You’ve got to try the shrimp in green sauce,” Matthews said. “Best thing on the menu—if you like garlic.”

She ordered that, plus a Diet Pepsi. He ordered a beer.

While they waited, he quizzed her about her West Coast years, and she found herself relaxing as she talked about herself. As long as he didn’t ask her about her life before that. Premed, medical school, the residencies… grueling years, but good ones. She’d left New York one person and arrived in California as another. The new Alicia had no past, owed nothing to no one. As she’d stepped off the plane, she’d been reborn as a being of her own creation.

She used the arrival of their meal—a metal crock filled with plump pink shrimp nestled in a lime-green sauce—to change the subject.

“But enough about me,” she said. “What about Floyd Stevens?”

“Taste first,” Matthews said as he spooned a generous portion onto her plate. “You don’t want to ruin a good meal with talk about scum.”

Alicia bit back a sharp retort. She hadn’t come for the food, she’d come for information, dammit. Instead she forked a shrimp in half and tasted it. God, it was good. Incredibly good. Quickly she ate the other half. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.