In someone else, what I did on the bridge would be philanthropy. For me it wasn’t. A shrink would probably have a field day with it, trying to put the pieces together, how it fit with the reason I came back from the East Coast, and the reason I had to leave L.A. Those are two different stories, by the way. I’m getting to that.

I hadn’t left Todd behind at the diner for more than three minutes when my cell rang again, and with a stab of guilt, remembering the call I’d ignored on the bridge, I immediately brought the Motobecane to a stop.

“It’s me.” Shay Clements was the owner of Aries Courier. “Fabian just radioed in. His crank’s busted, he’s stranded on Market Street. Can you go meet him, pick up his packages, and make his drops?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, right now?”

Shay wasn’t being pushy. A courier service stood or failed on its on-time performance, and that in itself gave me a twinge of confusion: The hour that had passed between the phone call on the bridge and this one was far too much time for Shay to wait. But there wasn’t time to wonder about that. “I’m on it right now,” I said. “I’m literally standing over my bike.”

“Thanks,” Shay said after giving me the intersection where I was to meet Fabian.

“It’s no problem,” I said.

And it wasn’t. This was my work now, and I did it with the great humility life has taught me since I washed out of the United States Military Academy at West Point, just two months before I would have graduated and become a second lieutenant in the United States Army.

two

My name is Hailey Cain. I’m twenty-three and have one of the most popular first names for girls of my generation. Every year in school there were half a dozen Hailies or Haleys or Haileys in my class.

I’m Californian in a way that a lot of people are Californian: I was born somewhere else. My father was Texan, my mother from West Virginia. I was born in an off-base hospital near Fort Hood, Texas, where Staff Sgt. Henry Cain was stationed at the time. I missed being born on the Fourth of July by one day; my birthday was the fifth. Maybe I was born to be a failed patriot.