“Well,” I said, measuring my words carefully, “I guess I was never really told what it is we’re hauling, exactly.”

He sat back and bridged his hands. “Is this information required for you to perform your job duties?”

“I…well, no, I guess not.”

“Julian, I’d like to give you a small piece of advice: don’t concern yourself with things that don’t require your concern. Here we have a prime example: you’ve been making runs for me in an efficient manner already, without having knowledge of what, exactly—as you said—you were hauling. Clearly, you don’t require this information to do the work, and I can’t imagine another purpose for it.”

I nodded.

“Concerning yourself with these trivial things—that, quite frankly, are not your business—is not a good practice in commerce or in life. I did not get to where I am professionally by stressing over things that don’t further my cause. Am I making sense?”

“Yes.”

It was odd to think back to just over a month ago, sitting in the offices of one of the most powerful financial firms in the world and rubbing shoulders with old and esteemed gentlemen who were all filthy rich. Through it all, I couldn’t remember any of them speaking to me this way. Yelling, chastising, putting down, perhaps; these things were common. But they were direct. There was no room for interpretation. With Vince, right then, it was an encoded message disguised as a clear message.

“This information was not given to you, because you have no need for it,” he continued. “My advice would be to not stress about the things you don’t know. If you needed to know it, I would have told you.”

“I understand,” I said, and wiped my hands on my pant legs.

“As I thought you would,” he said, and the smile returned. “I believe we’re done here.”

I rose to my feet and tried to think of something to say, but he spoke again before I could.

“You’re not planning on leaving without finishing your drink, are you?”

I looked down at the glass. “I don’t usually drink liquor in the middle of the day.”

He gave a polite chuckle. “It’s eighteen year-old single-malt. I’m afraid it cannot be wasted.”

He stared at me and waited. I picked up the glass and examined it, then tipped it back and swallowed the rest of the liquid. It must’ve been three shots of alcohol, and unfortunately I was still unable to tell the difference between good scotch and bad scotch. My eyes watered and I forced a straight face.

“Atta boy,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder from across the desk. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Of course,” I said, and walked to the door. As I was leaving, he spoke one last time.

“Electronics,” he said.

I stopped and turned around. “Excuse me?”

“Electronics” he repeated, looking at his desk, then back at me. His voice was flat and dry. “Consumer electronics are what you’re hauling. I buy direct and act as something of a wholesaler.”

I paused and again tried to find words. “Okay then,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

He nodded and turned his back.

26

After our conversation, I did not expect to be retained as Vince’s employee. It seemed I’d irked him in some way, whether he knew about me snooping around the trunk of that Chrysler or not. It was possible, I suppose, that our meeting was not out of the ordinary—that he was just “checking in,” as he said—but that was not how it felt. Leaving his house that day, I wondered if I had done my last run, and if that had been the case, it would have served as a relief.

But the runs continued—three in the next week—and the cash was piling up, easy and tax-free. No matter the denomination, there was something refreshing about not immediately handing a third—or, in my later years, half—of the money to the government. I kept what I made stacked in my sock drawer. I hardly had any expenses. When I was raking in the big bucks on Wall Street, it never felt like getting ahead, because more money was always quickly followed by more spending. New furniture, redecorations, extravagant dinners. Car payments, Manhattan rent, and mounds of student loan debt from both of us. But now, finally free of so many of those things, I made a point to limit my debt and financial obligations as much as possible. I’d paid off my credit cards shortly after arriving in Colorado, and after the most recent run, I found a buyer for my Mercedes in Denver and he paid me in cash. The sale was at a discount, but I didn’t care; I was free from car payments, and I didn’t need a luxury machine in the mountains anyway. I used a fraction of that money to buy an old Ford Explorer that smelled like mothballs but ran well and had four-wheel-drive. I was proud of myself.

Due to the odd meeting with Vince and the numerous runs I’d been on, my mind was mostly occupied with the job. In my downtime, my mind reflexively wandered into trying to solve the puzzle of everything I did not know. It became exhausting, to think about it constantly, and I asked myself whether I would actually be able to separate the things that concerned me from those that did not, as Vince suggested. Between the actual work and the ruminations about work, I did little else. The hikes stopped, the exploration stalled. I saw Suzanne occasionally, but hers was another puzzle I did not have the energy to try and solve. I thought of little else but the job and what to do about it.

One morning, that changed.

I strolled down to the local coffee shop after rolling out of bed around nine. The air was hot already; the weather report said we could be seeing highs of ninety in the mountains. Denver was bracing for record temperatures. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and black coffee. After I paid, I heard a voice to my left.

“Julian, right?”

I might not have recognized her dressed down, out of her slick dress and into jeans and a green fleece. I might not have recognized her with her long, tangly hair hidden underneath a brown beanie, an odd choice for this weather. I might not have, if it was anyone else, but it was her, so I did. I recognized her immediately, before I saw her face. I felt her presence, just as I had the first night, and her gravelly voice was unmistakable. Her eyes were unmistakable.

“I’m Adeline,” she said, when I didn’t respond right away. She reached out and shook my hand as if I needed a refresher on who she was. Her smile was effortless.

“Of course,” I said. “I remember you.” She stood eye-to-eye with me, or just a little shorter. She smelled of faint perfume. She owned the room, again. I got the self-conscious feeling of being watched, as if the other scattered patrons had all turned to stare at us, to see how I handled the interaction. I looked to my right. They hadn’t.

“You’re Suzanne’s guy,” she said.

“Something like that,” I said. “You’re Vince’s girl.”

“Something like that,” she said, and laughed.

Later, I would replay that line in my head a thousand times, analyzing the tone, dissecting the laugh, deciding the words meant nothing then reopening the case again five minutes later. Something like that. It would haunt me, because it suggested a glimmer of hope. And the human spirit will strive heedlessly towards the smallest glimmer when it is looking for hope. I found myself spending hours and days exploring the vast possibilities that lived inside that one innocuous statement.

And I wanted her. I didn’t know why, exactly, and it didn’t seem to matter. I just knew I wanted her; hard, fast, and terribly. We’d exchanged only a handful of sentences, but I knew it from the beginning. I had never believed in love at first sight, and I still didn’t. It wasn’t love. I didn’t know what it was. It was just a firm, hard, iron-gripped wanting, the way a child wants a popular new toy. I desired her. The hair, the flawless skin, the legs, the eyes. My god, the eyes. Outwardly, she was as close to perfection as I had seen.