David took the receipt, his thumb resting near the pink crayon writing. The wind from the highway blew a piece of dry gravel across my boot, and the smell of hot asphalt came off the lanes of Route Forty-One.
“This is not a custody dispute,” David said, his voice dropping into that quiet register he used when he was delivering mail to a tense house. “A kid does not write her mother’s name like this on a grocery scrap if she is just riding with her daddy.”
I touched my silver wedding ring, turning it around my finger twice while I looked toward the side of the building where the white van was parked. The air was heavy with the smell of gasoline and fried onions from the diner kitchen.
“She is not his,” I said. “He had her by the wrist like she was a suitcase he was trying not to drop. She did not make a sound, David.”
“The plate is Georgia,” David said, his eyes narrowing as he looked through the gap between the fuel pumps. “If he came down Seventy-Five, he has been driving for hours without a break.”
