He approached the woman slowly, hands visible.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She turned toward him. Her face stopped him for half a heartbeat. It wasn’t the face of someone stranded on a road. It was the face of someone stranded inside her own life. Her eyes were swollen, her cheeks drawn tight with the kind of crying that had gone on so long it had dried itself out. She wore clothes that cost more than Richard earned in months, but they were wrinkled, as if she had stopped caring how anything sat on her body.
For a moment she said nothing. Then she spoke in a voice so flat it frightened him more than panic would have.
“I don’t know where I was going anymore.”
Not, I’m lost. Not, my car broke down. Not, can you help me?
I don’t know where I was going anymore.
Richard had no training for this. He was just a delivery man, a man who brought food to doors and counted coins and wrapped his knees before dawn. But he knew something about loneliness. He knew the sound of pain when it had become too large to speak in ordinary words.
“Where do you live?” he asked gently. “I can help you get back.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t want to go back there tonight.”
Richard looked at the empty road, the expensive car, the dark city beyond, and then thought about his mattress, his tiny room, his last portion of rice. He thought about his rule.
