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Chloe considered this, her large, hazel-brown eyes scanning her mother’s face for the hairline fractures of a lie. Children, Arthur knew from his long-departed youth, were the most sophisticated lie detectors on earth; they didn’t listen to words, they listened to the tension in a parent’s vocal cords. But the mother held her expression steady, her amber eyes warm, unblinking, and fiercely protective.
Satisfied, Chloe took another small bite, chewing with her eyes closed, pretending she was in a palace instead of an unheated diner beside an interstate highway at nine o’clock on Christmas Eve.
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Arthur looked down at his own table.
Before him sat a twelve-ounce bone-in ribeye, a baked potato with sour cream and chives, a bowl of steamed green beans, and a ceramic basket containing four warm buttermilk biscuits with whipped honey butter. The bill had come to thirty-four dollars and eighty cents. He had tossed a fifty-dollar bill onto the table forty minutes ago and hadn’t touched a single morsel. The steak fat had begun to congeal into a dull, opaque white ring around the rim of the heavy ceramic plate; the steam from the potato had died an hour ago.
