Free The Shape of Desire by Sharon Shinn Page A

purple insulated lunch bag. “Oh!” she says when she sees me, so I assume she usually has the place to herself at this hour. There are four tables and only mine is occupied, so I figure it will be easy enough for her to ignore me.
    But once she buys a can of soda and tears two sheets from the paper-towel dispenser, she approaches my table in a cautious, sideways manner. “Do you want to sit here by yourself or could you use some company?” she asks in a soft voice.
    I muster the energy to smile and turn the magazine facedown. “I’d love some company,” I say. “Talking might help me stay awake.”
    She smiles and sits across from me, arranging her food before her. Her meal is so healthy it almost irritates me—baked chicken breast, fresh cut-up vegetables, and an apple. Kathleen can’t be more than an inch or two over five feet and probably weighs less than a hundred pounds, so I can’t imagine she’s dieting. She’s petite because this is the way she
likes
to eat.
    While she organizes her food, I have the opportunity to study her. She might be my age, mid-thirties, though her small size gives her a childlike air that subtracts at least five years. Today I don’t see any new bruises marring her face—or her arms or any other exposed stretch of flesh—and she’s wearing only light makeup over her fair skin. Her hairis a plain brown that she’s inexpertly washed with highlights; her clothes are pink and girly. I think this is someone who, pure and simple, loves pretty things and has far too few of them in her life.
    She uses a knife and fork to cut off a dainty piece of chicken and, right before popping it in her mouth, asks, “Why are you so sleepy?”
    I repeat my story about food poisoning and then embellish it. “I checked with my cousin—she’s the one I had brunch with—and
she
was sick yesterday afternoon, too, though not as bad as I was.”
    Kathleen quickly swallows. “I had food poisoning once when I was out of town at a hotel,” she says. “I thought I would
die
. I had the front desk call a doctor for me, and he sent over some pills.”
    “Wow, it didn’t even occur to me that there was something I could take to make me feel better.”
    She laughs. “I can’t remember if the pills did any good.” She takes another small bite and then asks, “Did you get to do
anything
fun over the weekend?”
    “Yeah, I felt great on Saturday and the weather was beautiful. A friend and I went hiking in Babler State Park.”
    “Oh, I love Babler!” she exclaims. “Ritchie goes there to train, but I just walk.”
    “Train? What for?”
    “He wants to run the Chicago Marathon next year, so he goes running with some of his buddies.”
    I rest my chin on my hand; my head feels so heavy I’m afraid it’ll pull me over onto the table if I don’t give it some support. “No disrespect to Ritchie, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to run twenty-six miles. For fun.”
    She laughs. “No, I think it sounds dreadful. But Ritchie likes to do hard things, you know? He likes to prove to himself that he’s really tough.”
    I fight to stifle a yawn. “I like to do easy things,” I say. “But it’s probably more admirable to do the hard ones.”
    “His brother’s a Navy SEAL,” Kathleen says.
    I nod. “And I guess he feels a little competitive.”
    “Yeah. He wanted to join the Army when he was eighteen, but they wouldn’t take him because of some problem with his feet. It was such a disappointment to him.”
    I find myself wondering if Ritchie was lying to Kathleen about the reason he’d been rejected from the military. Maybe the recruiters had analyzed his psychological profile and determined he was the type of man who would beat up his wife, and they’d decided to pass. “What’s he do now? I can’t remember.”
    “Security work,” she says.
    Great. He probably has a gun and some martial-arts training. Just the sort of advantages you’d want to give to a violent sociopath with