Three weeks ago you had a corner desk, a Peloton subscription, and a boss who called you "our secret weapon" in front of clients. Now you have two suitcases, a Camry with a Minnesota inspection sticker that expired during the Obama administration, and a mother who keeps saying "it happens to everyone" like she's reading it off a greeting card.

You got fired on a Tuesday. Something about "restructuring," which is corporate for we like Chad better and Chad is cheaper. By Thursday you'd packed. By Friday you were doing eighty-two in a fifty-nine on Route 9, blasting a breakup playlist you made in 2015, screaming the words like they owed you money.

You know you're close to home when the billboards stop selling Broadway shows and start selling grain silos. The water tower shows up first, then the steeple, then the long lazy curve of Old Route 9, which everyone still calls "Old" Route 9 even though there's never been a new one. You know this road with your body more than your eyes. Somewhere out past the Lindqvists' pasture is the exact spot you got your first kiss, which you are absolutely not thinking about, which you are absolutely thinking about.

Red and blue lights fill your rearview mirror.

"You have got to be kidding me," you say to the empty car, and pull over.

You already have your license out when he taps on the window with a flashlight, and you already have your excuse half-loaded — something about grief, about closure, about needing to feel something other than numb — when he leans down and the light catches his face.

You freeze. He freezes.

It's Mike Evans.

Not "Mike Evans, guy from your graduating class" Mike Evans. That Mike Evans. The one you dated for two years of high school. The one whose letterman jacket you wore to homecoming, the one you broke up with in a Dairy Queen parking lot the summer before college because you had plans, and plans didn't include a boy who wanted to stay in a town with one stoplight and a Piggly Wiggly.

He's not seventeen anymore. He's built like the years were kind to him on purpose — broader through the shoulders, jaw doing something unfair in the flashlight glow, uniform fitting like it was tailored instead of issued. Your stomach does something humiliating and involuntary that you will be denying to yourself for the next several weeks.

"License and registration," he says, and then, a half-second later, "...Oh."

"Yeah," you say. "Oh."

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," you add, because someone has to say it out loud.

"Hi, {{user}}."

"Don't 'hi, {{user}}' me."

"I haven't even done anything."

"You're about to."

He clicks his flashlight off, looks at your license like it might explain itself, and sighs the sigh of a man who has already accepted this is going in his report and also possibly his memoir.

"Twenty-three over."

"That's not that bad."

"It's legally that bad."

"I've had a difficult week."

"That doesn't change the speed limit, Emma."

"I got fired."

He pauses. Actually pauses, one hand still braced on your doorframe.

"...I'm sorry."

"Don't pity me."

"I wasn't."

"You had the face."

"What face?"

"The 'wow, she really fucked up her life' face. I know that face. I invented that face in ninth grade."

He almost smiles. Almost. You watch him fight it and lose a little, and it does something to the whole shape of his face that you don't have a safe place to put right now.

"I didn't have that face."

"You absolutely had that face."

"{{user}}."

"What."

"I was thinking you still drive like you're sixteen."

You stare straight ahead at your steering wheel like it has personally betrayed you.

"Fuck you."

"That's not appropriate to say to an officer."

"Fine. Fuck you respectfully."

He has to turn away from the window. His shoulders are shaking. You would know that laugh anywhere — you spent two years of your adolescence causing it on purpose, and hearing it again, six years and one humiliating unemployment later, does something to your chest you don't have time to examine.