Just Drive!

"You're supposed to be in bed." Norman said blocking my way.

"Good morning to you too, Norman."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." I pulled my coat off the hook by the door, bag already on my shoulder, keys already in my hand. "Move."

He didn't move. He stood at the end of the hallway with a mug of coffee.

"Sarah."

"Norman."

"The doctor said one week."

"The doctor said rest. I rested." I pulled the door open and the cold morning air came in sharp and immediate. "All night. Horizontally. Like a person. I feel fantastic."

"You look—"

"Fantastic," I said. "I look fantastic. Thank you for noticing."

I walked out.

He followed. Of course he followed. I had lived in this house for five months and I had yet to successfully leave a room without this man showing up somewhere.

I was already at the truck when I heard his boots on the gravel.

"You're not driving," he said.

"Watch me." I held up the keys.

"Sarah—"

"Two options." I turned to face him. "I drive myself, or you drive me. Those are the only options on the table this morning. Pick one."

He looked at me. Looked at the keys. Did the internal calculation I had watched him do a hundred times. And then he held out his hand. I dropped the keys into his palm, walked around to the passenger side, and waited.

He opened the door while I climbed in without acknowledging it. He went around to the driver's side, started the engine, and sat with both hands on the wheel looking straight out at the long gravel drive without saying a word.

"Where are we going?" he said, finally.

I smiled. "Just drive."

-----

 The man behind the counter, grey-haired and unhurried, looked up when we came in, nodded at Norman with the recognition of people who had lived in the same small town long enough to know each other without needing to, and went back to whatever he was doing.

I moved straight to the rails.

Norman stood in the middle of the shop floor with his hands in his jacket pockets watching me pull shirts and jackets from their hangers with the focused energy of a woman on a mission, his expression moving slowly from confusion to something more deeply confused.

"These are men's clothes," he said.

"Well spotted."

"Why are we looking at men's clothes?"

"Because I need them."

"You need—" he stopped. Tried again. "Are you buying someone a gift?"

"Mm."

A pause. "Someone from the city perhaps. Or the baby's father. Who you haven't mentioned to anyone."

I looked up from the rail.

I held his gaze for exactly one second longer than necessary. Then I went back to the rail.

"The Vane Group is coming to Hale," I said.

"But you cancelled that visit."

"I wrote them back." I held a flat cap up, and examined it. "I've been thinking about what you said."

I moved to the next rail.

"You were right. A Vane Group partnership puts Hale on a global map that would take us five more years to reach alone. So I invited them."

"Right." He said it slowly. "And the men's clothes are for...?"

"You." I said it jokingly.

I turned around. His face looked pale.

"Absolutely not," he said.

"Norman—"

"Look at what you're holding." He pointed at the jacket in my hands. "Look at it and tell me with a straight face that you have ever once in your life had any instinct whatsoever about what looks good on another human being."

"There is nothing wrong with this jacket."

"It has patches on the elbows."

"That's a design—"

"That is what happens to fabric after thirty years of continuous wear." He took it from my hands with the calm authority of a man removing something from a situation and put it back on the rail. "I have perfectly good clothes at the estate. Why would I need—"

"They're not for you," I said.

He stopped.

"They're for me."

He looked at the rail. Looked at me. Looked at the flat cap I had under my arm. Something was shifting in his expression.

I held up the flat cap. "Julian is a close associate of my ex-husband. He cannot come to my estate and look at my face. Not yet."

I tried the cap on and turned to the small mirror at the end of the rail. "So you host Julian as you always do — tell him I'm on a business trip, same story as always. But I will be in the room. Julian Vane will not see Sarah." I met Norman's eyes in the mirror. "He'll see someone else entirely."

Norman looked at me in the flat cap.

Then he pressed his lips together, suppressing a laughter.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're laughing at me."

"I would never laugh at a woman's disguise strategy," he said, in the voice of a man actively laughing at a woman's disguise strategy.

"It's not funny, it's a plan."

"It's a flat cap, Sarah."

"It's the beginning of a plan." I turned from the mirror. "The cap is just one component. I'll need a proper disguise. Something that would hold up in a room." I looked at him. "You said you know someone."

The laughter faded. "I said I know someone," he confirmed. "She'll do a better job than Miller's." He took the flat cap from my head, and returned it to the shelf. "But first—"

he turned to face me fully, and his voice dropped into the register it went when something actually mattered to him "—who is he. The ex-husband. He must be someone significant if Julian Vane in the same room as you is this complicated."

The shop was quiet around us. The man behind the counter was very focused on his paperwork.

I looked at Norman.

"Tyler Rider," I said quietly.

He went completely still.

"Rider's Industries," I said. "Rider's Winery. New York City." I watched him process it. "So you understand now. Why Julian Vane cannot look at my face."

Norman said nothing for a long moment.nHe didn't say anything about it. He wouldn't. That wasn't how Norman worked.

He simply straightened, looked around Miller's one final time. "Come on then," he said, holding the door open. "Bea's going to need the full afternoon."

I followed him out into the cold.

"Norman." He looked back. "Thank you. For not making it a bigger thing than—"

"Don't thank me yet." The corner of his mouth moved. "Wait until you've sat in Bea's chair for three hours and then tell me how grateful you are."

He walked to the truck.

I stood on the pavement for a moment in the sharp morning air and looked at his back and thought about a man who drove me to town when I shouldn't be driving, opened doors he pretended not to care about, and received the information that my ex-husband was one of the most powerful men in New York without making me feel small for having been married to him.

Then I followed him to the truck before he could notice I was staring at him.