As their meetings pick up, she finds that she enjoys The Bean Dream – her order is perfect every single time and so are the sweets. Hannah is good at the job, she observes in the moments of down time. Work meetings are, after all, the one time she is ever running early.

Hannah’s polite to customers with a perfectly polished smile on her face that Caroline is used to seeing being given to lawyers at company parties, but it’s charming regardless of the setting. And, she notes with some small amusement, given the second look Hannah often gets from most men and some women after she helps them, she knows people are coming here for more than just their coffee.

Hannah regards her with an interesting combination of caution and friendliness, always sliding across from her or next to her, depending on the table she chooses. Sometimes, the two times Caroline arrives a few minutes late, she sees Hannah already seated, two drinks in front of her, drawing in a sketchbook. It was the same one she’d had with her at their lunch, but she’d first mistaken it for a plain notebook.

Because they have to meet in such short periods of time, she is there fairly often – a couple of times a week – but she gets all of the information she needs from Hannah, peeling back the layers of her marriage one by one.

“We met in college – he was in law school while I was in undergrad, studying architecture. And he was charming. He pulled out all of the stops; he flew us to Paris on our three month anniversary, and I… I’d never done anything like that before. I hadn’t even ever left the country before. I didn’t grow up with all of that money. Then, right before my senior year, I was pregnant and when he proposed and asked what I thought about being a stay-at-home mom, I thought it sounded like the lives of people I envied so much.”

And –

“I knew he was cheating; I’m not oblivious. He’s, if I had to guess, had affairs for at least six years. We were married for almost ten, and I… I’d be willing to bet in retrospect that he wasn’t faithful in the beginning, either. But I’ve never had it thrown in my face like I did with Mindy.”

And –

“Michael – it’s not easy to leave him. I’d thought about it so many times. I came up with all of these plans, but he has a temper. And there aren’t a lot of things that scare me that aren’t directly related to my daughter, but Michael at his worst… was terrifying.”

And –