I.
The bag was in the trunk before Carrie had fully registered the woman putting it there.
She’d come through the arrivals door already braced for the particular tedium of the production driver — the suited man with the iPad sign, the professional blankness, the smooth pivot into a rehearsed how was your flight — and instead there was this. Shaggy dark hair. A grey henley. Hands that took her bags with a kind of easy authority that suggested she’d done it a thousand times and hadn’t found it beneath her once.
She came around and looked at Carrie across the roof of the car.
“Carrie?”
Not Ms. Sellars. Not welcome, the production sent me. Just her name, like a question that already knew its answer.
“That’s me”
“Nico.” A nod toward the door. “Traffic’s not bad. About 50 minutes to your hotel, I think.”
That was all. No performance. She got in.
Carrie stood by the passenger door for a half-second — back, she told herself, you get in the back, that’s how this works — and got in the back.
