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Otis trotted over to me immediately.

“Good morning to you too.” I bent to scratch behind his torn ear as he sniffed my purse.

“No bacon today.”

Otis looked disappointed and turned away with a doggie huff. Dean glanced up, smiled, then pointed at the phone and rolled his eyes.

I’d spent most of yesterday trying not to think about how natural Saturday had felt, which had been about as successful as trying not to think about my memories of my future life fading.

Brian came back in, poured a coffee and grinned at me.

“Dean said there was a goat.”

“There was.”

I smiled and set my purse beneath the counter as Brian talked about the girl he’d met, Amber something or other, another pretty girl in a long string of pretty girls that Brian dated but always moved on from when things got too serious. He would have made a great seventies hippie.

For the next half hour, I settled into the routine of work. A woman bought The Beach Boys for her mother. A college boy asked whether we had anything by a band he’d heard in Minneapolis but couldn’t remember the name of. Brian discovered three copies of the same Journey album filed in different places around the store and argued that this proved customers were reorganizing the store when we weren’t looking.

“It proves you’re lazy,” I told him.

“That’s your interpretation.”

“It’s Dean’s too.”

“We have an oppressive management culture.”

Dean came around the counter carrying a box cutter. “You’re free to pursue other opportunities.”

Brian looked wounded. “And leave Otis?”

Otis slept through the discussion.

I was pricing a used copy of The Cars when the bell over the door rang again.

The man who entered wasn’t a customer. I knew it before he’d taken three steps inside, although I couldn’t have said why. He wore a blue summer suit despite the heat, with a pale blue shirt open at the collar and a brown leather folder tucked beneath one arm. His hair was neatly cut and gray at the temples, and he had the controlled, self-contained manner of someone who didn’t waste movement.

Dean stopped what he was doing, which was what made me look at him. Not enough for anyone else to notice, probably, but I knew Dean better than I had a week ago, and something in his face changed when the man walked in.

The stranger noticed me first, then he looked at Dean.

“Mr. Wyatt.”

Dean set down the box cutter. “Martin.”

The man crossed to the counter, stepping around Otis’s rear leg with the caution of someone who had done it before.

“I was hoping you might have remembered something about that phone call.”

Dean’s gaze flicked toward me.

“What call?” I asked.

Neither man answered immediately.

Brian, who possessed a remarkable instinct for knowing when he should leave and an equally remarkable habit of ignoring it, picked up his coffee.

“I’m going to check the back.” He disappeared through the stockroom curtain as I turned back to the man in the suit.