Delotta Brown had always been the kind of woman who finished other people’s sentences—not because she was rude, but because she listened so fiercely that the words simply fell out of her before they could stop them.
“Because I’m the only one who can.”
The man blinked. “Yeah. Exactly.”
By morning, she had packed a small bag: a flashlight, a notebook, a stale croissant, and her grandmother’s compass that always pointed south, no matter which way she turned. She stepped out into the gray dawn, the laundromat humming behind her like a heartbeat.
“And so I said to him, I’m not paying for a blender that—” a man in a paint-splattered jacket began.
