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“You can’t run off everybody who talks to me.”

“It wasn’t the talking.” He went back to his seat by the dryer.

I stood there with my face on fire and tried to remember how to make change.

Brynn came at lunch with a burrito. She looked at her brother, and her whole face eased.

“He hasn’t been bothering you?” she asked me.

I thought about the hallway. “No.”

“Good.” She squeezed my hand. “I sleep better knowing you’re out there with him. He’s an idiot, but he’d die before he let anything happen to you.”

She tore the burrito in two and handed me my half. I wasn’t feeling very hungry. I hadn’t done a single thing wrong, and yet, I already felt like a liar.

Inés Cordero came at four.

The dark Charger pulled up behind Havoc’s bike. The driver got out first, a big man with a shaved head, and he held the door for her.

She wore pale blue this time. She smiled at me when she came in, and at Havoc, and at the two old men waiting on dryer four, who decided their clothes were dry enough and left. They knew trouble when they saw it.

“Ava-Rose,” she said. “You’ve had a difficult week. I was sorry to hear it.”

My knees were shaking behind the counter. I’d been dreading this for ten days, and I’d practiced what I’d say every morning in the shower.

I reached under the register for the bank bag Deacon had sent over that morning. I laid the four bundles on the counter, one at a time.

“That’s yours,” I said. “It was on my kitchen table, but I’m sure you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? It’s all there. You can count it.”

“That was a gift.”

“I don’t want it. My answer’s the same as it was. No.”

She left the money where it was. She turned her head and gave Havoc a long look. His boots. His knuckles. The patch on his chest.

“So this is who you found to stand behind you.” Her voice was kind. “I understand it. But I’ve known a lot of men like him, Ava-Rose. They get bored. One day there’s a run, or another woman, and you’re alone again.”

“Pick up your money and leave,” I said.

She sighed, and nodded to the driver.

He came around the end of my counter. Maybe he meant to scare me. Maybe he meant to put that money in my hands, or put his hands on me. I don’t know. But he only got two steps.

Havoc was off his seat and in front of him in seconds. He put himself so close that the driver had to stop or walk into him.

He stopped.

Havoc had made jokes his whole life, but I had never once heard him go this quiet. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and looked at that man the way you’d look at a thing you were about to break.

“You were driving,” he said. It was barely above a whisper. “Last Friday night. I know your face. You touch her, you touch that counter, you so much as breathe on her, and I’ll take that hand off at the wrist and mail it to Tomas so he understands.”

The driver had forty pounds on him. He looked into Havoc’s face, and he took a step back.

“Enough!” Inés said.

She gathered the bundles into her purse herself. She was still smiling, but it had gone thin.

“Keep the dress another week,” she told me. “I’ll collect it next Friday. You have seven days to be sensible about this. I’m giving you another chance. After that, I stop asking, but I’m trying to help you.”