Page 7 of My Broken Biker

"Whatever needs protecting."

"Who's doing the protecting?"

"People who protect things the law either can't reach or won't prioritize," I say, and leave it there without elaborating.

She looks at me for a moment, not with alarm or the neutral expression people put on when something surprises them and they want time to decide what to do with it. She's just looking, working it through.

"Does that ever make you uncomfortable?" she asks.

"No," I say. And then, because she asked it honestly and I find I want to answer honestly: "There was a time I might have wanted it to."

She receives this without pressing on it. She picks up her cup with both hands, the way she seems to always hold it, and looks at the street outside the window for a moment, and I look at my coffee.

"Can I ask something else?" she says.

"You can ask."

"The deployments," she says, still looking out the window as she asks it, like she's making it easy for me to not answer if I don't want to. "Were they both hard, or just one?"

I’m surprised by her question.

"Both hard," I say. "Different kinds of hard."

She nods once, and doesn't ask which kind was which. "Do you miss it?" she says.

"The clarity of it," I say. "I miss that. What the job is, who you're doing it with, what you're protecting. Everything else was hard."

She's quiet for a moment, still looking at the street. "The everything else sounds like it was the most important part," she says.

"It was," I say. "That's the problem with it."

She looks at me then, fully, and I look back, and the coffee shop continues quietly around us.

What's she like?" I ask.

She doesn't answer right away. Not stalling, just finding the right thing rather than the nearest one.

"Last spring I was late for a call," she says. "I hadn't even made breakfast yet. I came downstairs and she'd already done it. Two bowls of cereal, too much milk in both of them." She pauses. "She'd folded dish towels into rectangles beside the bowls."

"For napkins," I say.

"She'd decided they'd work if you folded them right." She looks at her cup. "That's Angela."

I drink my coffee.

"She also corrects people all the time," Harper says, after a moment.

"Does she correct you often?" I ask.

"Constantly," she says, and something at the corner of her mouth moves without quite becoming a smile. "And she's usually right."

Something moves in my face before I get to it, and I look at my coffee.

"She gets it from somewhere," Harper says. "I'm not saying where."

I look at her. She's looking at her cup with that same almost-smile and not looking up, and I find I'm watching for what her face does next in the specific way you watch for things that have started meaning something.

We stay at the table for close to an hour and a half.