former?

—Montgomery Community customers, but many others were unfamiliar to him. He wanted to get his hands on those pamphlets, but he decided to forgo the line and pick them up on his way out. Instead, he snooped around the tellers’ windows, peeking at the area behind the partition.

“What are you doing here?”

Coy turned to see Florine walking toward him from where she’d been speaking to two men in dark business suits. He almost did a double take, unsure for a second if it was really her. Hadn’t he just called Florine at work? How could she be here? It was possible that she’d had her calls forwarded from Evergreen Title to her cell. But why had she denied any knowledge of the new bank when here she was, apparently meeting with some of its executives? Confused, he started to ask her what was going on, but she cut him off.

“I said, what are you doing here?”

“I—”

She slapped him. Hard. Her knee drove deep into his groin, and he went down in an explosion of pain.

Strong hands grabbed him and carried him through the lobby. He hadn’t noticed any security guards when he’d walked in, but every bank had at least one, and he was pretty sure that’s who was silently removing him from the building. He saw some of his—

former

—customers glance at him, then look quickly away, and then the glass door opened before him and the two men who had been carrying him placed him butt-down on the sidewalk. The pain was still excruciating, and he leaned back against the building, waiting for it to subside.

What the hell was going on?

Something far outside the normal bounds of business, that was certain.

Experimentally, Coy attempted to stand. There was a brief slash of agony that flared from his testicles to his stomach as pressure was put on the muscles that met at his crotch. The pain receded slightly as he balanced on two feet, enough at least for him to walk, and he hobbled past two men heading into the bank.

He definitely had something to report to Shanley, but what it meant he had no clue.

Slowly, he made his way up the block to where he’d parked, hoping all the way to feel a tap on his shoulder or an arm around his midsection as Florine came after him to apologize. But she didn’t try to catch up to him, and when he reached the end of the block and looked back down the sidewalk before turning, there was no sign of her.

3

Anita went over to the bookstore at lunch. She showed up without warning, bearing food from Juan Wang’s, which Kyle had said earlier in the week that he wanted to try. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done something like this, couldn’t remember the last time either of them had acted so spontaneously, and she realized that maybe if she’d been more consistent in putting this sort of effort into the marriage, the situation with Steven never would have happened.