THE FRIDAY TRAIN HOME

At 4:10 on the wettest Friday Hawthorne Junction had seen all November, Cecilia Rowan watched the most feared man in town sit down in the rain and wait for someone who never came.

He had an umbrella.

Technically, two umbrellas.

The men who arrived with him were holding them twenty yards away.

Neither dared offer one.

Cece stood behind the ticket counter with a stack of refund forms in her hands and stared through the rain-streaked glass as Massimo Corvelli settled onto the second bench from the far end of the platform.

Same bench.

Same black coffee.

Same white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled over powerful forearms marked in old black ink.

Same 4:17 train from Manhattan.

Six Fridays in a row, Cece had watched him do it.

She had seen people miss trains, chase trains, curse trains, kiss beside trains, sleep through announcements, drag children by one mitten toward trains, and once propose marriage between Tracks Two and Three because somebody's boyfriend had apparently decided nothing said forever like the smell of wet brake dust.

She had never seen anyone simply wait.

Not like Massimo Corvelli.

The people of Hawthorne Junction called him Max only if they knew him well or wanted others to believe they did. Everyone else lowered their voices around his name.

He owned Corvelli Commercial Refrigeration, a legitimate company with service trucks all over southern New York and northern New Jersey. He also owned, according to whichever customer happened to be whispering through Cece's ticket window, pieces of freight companies, warehouses, restaurants, nightclubs, and perhaps several men who wore expensive coats and spent too much time looking at exits.

One commuter claimed Max had once broken a man's hand with a wrench.

Another swore he had paid a stranger's mortgage for a year after the stranger's husband died.

Cece believed neither story completely.

Rumors liked clean shapes.

People rarely had them.

What she knew was this: every Friday at four, a black SUV appeared outside the station. Two men got out. Max entered alone. He placed cash neatly beside the register for one black coffee, declined the change if it was under a dollar, and walked to the same bench.

At 4:17, the Manhattan train arrived.

He watched every passenger get off.

He greeted none of them.

Then he waited until the platform emptied, threw away his cup, and left.

Today the rain came sideways beneath the platform awning.

His shirt had darkened at the shoulders. Water ran from his hair past the hard line of his jaw.

One of his men—the older one, Marcus, Cece had learned—shifted beneath his umbrella.

Max ignored him.

"Your boyfriend is going to drown."

Cece looked toward the maintenance window.

Dale Mercer, the fifty-eight-year-old station supervisor, was hunched over the ancient electric heater with a screwdriver.

"He's not my boyfriend."

"Good. Seems high maintenance."

"He hasn't spoken ten words to me."

"Best kind, then."

"Dale."

"I'm repairing public property. I'm allowed one bad joke per fuse."

Cece looked through the glass again.

Max had not moved.

There was something about stubborn suffering that annoyed her.

Maybe because she had spent seven years watching her father insist he was fine while cancer hollowed him out from the inside. Maybe because her mother had spent another eighteen months saying she wasn't lonely while sleeping on the sofa because she could not tolerate the empty side of the bed.

People loved calling endurance strength.

Sometimes endurance was only fear with good posture.

Cece hung the CLOSED FOR FIVE MINUTES sign on her window.

Dale looked up.

"Oh, no."

"What?"

"That's the face you made before rebuilding the schedule relay instead of calling maintenance."

"It was clicking wrong."

"Now you're going to fix the mafia."

"I'm giving a customer an umbrella."

"That sentence has killed people in movies."

She took the station's oversized blue umbrella from the hook by the employee door.

"Watch my window."

"Cece."

She was already outside.

Cold rain slapped her calves beneath the hem of her uniform skirt. She was twenty-nine, five-foot-eight, broad-hipped, full-bodied, and thoroughly accustomed to the fact that inexpensive uniforms were apparently designed for women shaped like filing cabinets. The navy jacket pulled slightly across her chest, and her damp brown hair had already escaped the loose knot at her neck.

She did not look dangerous.

That was probably why Marcus stared at her as though she had walked onto the tracks.

"Ma'am," he called.

Cece raised the umbrella.

"I'm preventing a customer complaint."

Marcus actually blinked.

Max heard her footsteps and turned.

Up close, he was more intimidating than at a distance. Not because he scowled—he didn't—but because he seemed completely still. The kind of stillness built from expecting the room to move around him.

Cece stopped beside the bench.

"You're getting soaked."

"I noticed."

"Good. I was worried organized crime had damaged your nerves."

Marcus coughed somewhere behind her.

Max looked at Cece for three long seconds.

Then one corner of his mouth moved.

"Is that what they're calling refrigeration repair now?"

"Depends who you ask."

She opened the umbrella wider and sat beside him.

Not too close.

Rain thundered against the nylon.

The tracks disappeared into a gray curve.

For almost a minute, neither spoke.

Cece could feel him waiting for her to explain herself.

She could also feel something else.

Exhaustion.

Not the physical sort.

She knew that kind too well.

At 4:14, the signal changed.

Max's posture sharpened.

Cece watched him watch the tracks.

And because she had never learned when to leave a wound untouched, she asked the question everyone else in Hawthorne Junction had apparently been too frightened or too polite to ask.

"Who are you waiting for?"

For a while he looked only at the signal. Cece expected him to tell her to mind the timetable. Instead, he slipped a damp paper ticket from his shirt pocket. On the back, in blue pen, someone had written, Run if you're late. There was a heart underneath, crooked and impatient.

"My daughter," he said. "Iris. She's twenty-three."

Cece lowered her voice. "Is she missing?"

"Six weeks. I reported it. The detective calls when there's something to say." His thumb rubbed the ticket without quite touching the writing. "On the morning she vanished, she told me she was coming home on the Friday train. Said she had something to show me that would make me angry. I told her we could talk when she arrived."

"You didn't meet her?"

"I was working. I sent a car." He looked down at his rain-darkened shirt. "She didn't get in."

Cece knew better than to offer a sentence about everything happening for a reason. Her father had hated those sentences. "You can keep waiting," she said. "But you don't have to do it wet."

The 4:17 rounded the bend, headlights reflected in the tracks. Max stood. They watched commuters descend, shoulders hunched beneath coats. A college student dragged a suitcase; a father lifted a sleeping child over a puddle. Nobody approached Max. He stayed until the conductor gave the departure signal.

As the doors closed, Cece caught movement behind the old baggage building beyond Track Three. A white service van backed away from a locked loading entrance. The company logo on its door showed a blue snowflake inside a circle.

Corvelli Commercial Refrigeration.

"Are your people working here?" she asked.

Max followed her gaze. His jaw tightened. "No."

The van rolled past the station clock and disappeared into the rain. Cece saw a familiar detail just before it turned: a yellow scarf caught in the rear door, its fringe whipping against the metal. The same bright yellow scarf appeared in the missing-person photograph Marcus had shown Dale the previous week.

Max took one step toward the tracks. Cece caught his sleeve, not to hold him there, but to turn him toward the pedestrian crossing. "We go the safe way," she said.