Chapter 1
The day had stretched so long that Liana suspected she’d already lived through it a hundred times, repeating itself with the stubborn dedication of a groundhog that had somehow secured a hospital residency.
She had just said her daily thirty-minute-long goodbye to her grandma and was now making her way down the clinic corridor, trying to leave before the old lady found another reason to keep her there.
A glance at her watch earned an eye roll and a muttered, “Shit, I’m gonna be late.”
She rounded the corner into yet another lint-green hallway that had obviously been designed by someone who believed all hospitals should have a somewhat depressing color. Getting her car to the workshop in under ten minutes was already a lost cause, especially with a five-mile drive standing between her and anything resembling punctuality.
She slipped into an easy jog, offering tired smiles to nurses and patients as she passed. When she reached the final corner, the elevator doors were already in the process of closing with finality.
“No, no, no; wait!” Liana picked up speed, her voice rising. “Wait, please!” Inside, a man noticed her desperation and slid his hand between the doors just in time. They reopened with a dubious groan, and she stumbled in. “Thank you,” she panted.
“No problem.”
Her breathing was still too fast, but at least she had made it. She focused on slowing it down, trying not to sound like she was auditioning for a dramatically dying damsel in distress in some sassy soap opera.
The elevator gave a sudden, unfriendly rumble and stopped between floors with the willingness to quit moving for a while.
The man’s arm shot out, steadying her before she could pitch forward. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I… Yeah.” She blinked at the ceiling as if it might offer answers. “Did the elevator just… stop?”
“Apparently.” He chuckled and pressed the button for the ground floor, but nothing happened; the red number above the doors stayed stubbornly fixed on level three. “Yep. It’s stuck.”
“Shit. Not today.” Liana dropped her backpack with a frustrated thud.
“Would any other day of the week be more convenient for being locked in an elevator?” he asked, deadpan.
That earned a little laugh from her. “Yes. Tuesday would be fine.”
“Too bad it’s Thursday.” He hit the emergency button. After a moment, a robotic voice crackled through the speaker and asked for the nature of the emergency. “Yeah, uh, hi. We’re stuck in the elevator at Roosevelt Memorial Hospital. Between floors four and three, I guess.”
Silence followed, then a flat reply: “Yes, there is a power outage. Emergency power does not cover the visitor elevators. We will send someone to look into this, but, uhm, you need a bit of patience.” The line went dead.
“Great.” Liana sank to the floor. Over the last few days, the entire small town had been wrestling with power issues, and outages had become an everyday occurrence. “I’m Liana. Stuck in an elevator.”
He settled against the opposite wall. “Robin. Stuck in an elevator too, on a day that is not a Tuesday.”
“HA! Yeah.” She let the back of her head meet the metal wall.
“You escaped the psych ward?”
She gave a hearty laugh. “I was visiting my grandma. She broke her leg and is currently complaining to every nurse in sight because she can’t get up for a smoke. What about you?”
“My uncle. Heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No worries. He’s a machine.” Robin scratched the back of his head, looking mildly impressed by the absurdity of the situation. “He drove himself to the hospital after his heart decided to quit. I have no idea how he managed that.”
Liana’s eyes wandered over his face as he talked. He looked to be around her age, somewhere in his early thirties, with a tall, lean build that still carried enough muscle to indicate he did something more strenuous than lifting a coffee mug for exercise. His dark brown eyes had an easy mischief to them, which suited the same colored hair that somehow matched the neatly kept beard annoyingly well.
“And here I am, falling asleep on the couch and getting six weeks of neck pain,” she joked, giving him a rueful smile.
“Ah, you’re over thirty.” His expression remained completely deadpan. “Ever tried sneezing while horizontal? I swear I heard something in my back snap.”
“No, haven’t tried that yet, but you’ve just unlocked a new fear.”
“Sorry.” Robin looked her over properly now, taking in the head of red curls, bluish eyes, and the ridiculous number of freckles scattered across her face. Her dark brown jacket made her already pale skin look even lighter, and somehow the whole combination worked. She carried herself with enough casual exhaustion to make it clear she probably had no idea what she looked like right now. “So, why the urgency? Was your grandma annoying?”
“No, I… Yes, but I have an appointment in,” she checked her watch, “a minute to fix my car. Guess I need to make a new one.”
“What’s wrong with your car?”
“I don’t know. It started making this weird noise, like… weeeeee weeeeee.” She imitated it with a grimace. “Don’t know, like a whining? The faster I go, the louder it cries. Maybe it’s just too old. Mechanic said it’s gonna cost around five thousand bucks.”
"Weeeeee, weeeeee?” he echoed, smiling, then burst out laughing when her cheeks flushed. “Is it the differential?”
“Yes, that’s what he said.” Her eyes widened in surprise.
“What car do you drive?”
“A 2002 Honda Accord.”
“Ouch.” He laughed out loud. “Your mechanic is a greedy fucker. The part itself is pretty cheap when bought used. I don’t even think it’s possible to get a new one anymore. I’d say, with luck, it’s around seven fifty.”
“What? Are you for real?”
“I’m a mechanic.” He gave her a look that suggested the answer should have been obvious. “Yes, there’s labor on top of that, but five thousand is completely out of line. That’s worth more than ten times what your car is probably worth.”
“You haven’t even seen her yet,” Liana protested, unable to hide the slight offense in her voice.
The little red car had been a graduation gift from her grandfather, and she had driven it for fifteen years. Every year, she told herself she was finally going to buy something newer, preferably something that did not require her to negotiate with mechanics over whether its continued existence was financially responsible. Unfortunately, newer cars tended to come with newer-car prices, which had always put a fairly decisive end to that plan.
“It’s twenty-four years old, 6th generation, worth maybe two hundred if you find someone stupid enough to buy it.” Robin held her gaze as he pulled a card from his pocket and offered it to her. “Here. Come by whenever you find the time. Just not on a Tuesday.”
Liana took the card with a chuckle. “No? Would a Friday work? Because that is tomorrow.”
He shrugged and nodded. “Sure. Works for me.”
With a loud rumble, the elevator finally lurched back to life, and the sudden movement earned them both a brief moment of silence. After several seconds of standing there together with nothing left to troubleshoot, Liana decided that staring at the floor numbers was probably not going to make the ride any more awkward.
When the doors finally opened onto the parking level, she stepped out and pointed toward the right. “I’m going that way.”
“Heading left.” Robin nodded toward the opposite side of the garage, then glanced at her with a grin. “But I’ll wait for you to drive past. I need to know whether your impression was accurate.”
She burst out laughing and shook her head. “Sure thing. I’ll speed through the garage just so you can hear I’m right.”
She started walking toward her car, still grinning at the ridiculousness of the situation. Somehow, getting trapped in an elevator had turned into an impromptu automotive consultation followed by a very serious agreement to evaluate her impression of a dying differential.
Once she reached her car, Liana took another look at the card Robin had given her before putting it carefully into her purse. She got into the little red Honda and drove toward the exit, where a BMW was waiting nearby. Behind the wheel, she spotted Robin, apparently just as committed to the promised sound test as he had claimed.
As she approached, Liana rolled down her window. When she drove past, she screamed from the bottom of her lungs, ”Weeeeeeeee weeeeeeeeeee!"
In the rearview mirror, she caught sight of him laughing, and it made her smile. For the first time that day, the hospital, the power outage, and the looming repair bill seemed slightly less miserable.
A little nervous, Liana drove her noise machine to the auto shop the following day after work. She told herself the nerves were about the car. That explanation lasted until she pulled into the shop and spotted Robin already standing outside, wiping his hands with a rag.
He was covered in the evidence of an honest day’s work, with oil smeared across his face and his clothes carrying enough dirt to suggest he had personally fought an engine and won.
Unfortunately, the whole mechanic look suited him far too well. There was something deeply unfair about a man being that attractive while covered in grease.
Liana parked and stepped outside before she could stare long enough to make the situation embarrassing. “Hey,” she called, walking over.
“Hey. Thought you wouldn’t show up, but then I heard your car hitting Abbey Street.”
She chuckled because the street was nearly five miles away. Apparently, the car had decided that announcing her arrival from a different postal code was perfectly reasonable. “So? Is it the differential?”
“Given the sound, yeah. Your impression was pretty accurate.” Robin nodded toward the car, and they started walking over. “Now let’s take a look at that grandma.”
“Hey! She has never disappointed me.”
“No? Not even now?”
“Only on Tuesdays.”
He laughed, flashing a row of mostly straight teeth, and Liana caught herself watching his mouth before remembering that she was supposed to behave like a functioning adult. But one tooth was slightly crooked, which somehow made his smile even cuter. She was beginning to suspect the man had been designed specifically to inconvenience her.
“I see.” His gaze settled on hers for a moment before he continued. “I already called around. There’s exactly one dealer who has the part. He wanted eight-fifty, but I talked him down to six-forty.”
“Ah, you’ve got skills, huh? And what does it cost me altogether? With the…” She gestured vaguely toward her car. “Work it will take to fix her?”
“Uh, six-forty.”
Liana stopped walking. “What?”
“I’ve never met someone who proudly drives around in a car that was popular when Britney Spears was and is not considered an oldtimer.” His mouth twitched. “So you only have to pay for the part. It might take about a week; I’ll do the work after official hours, but yeah.”
“Noooo, you can’t do that.” She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Why would you?”
“I don’t know. You got stuck in an elevator with me and survived. On a Thursday, too. I’d say you deserve a little luck.”
Liana exhaled slowly. “That’s really nice, seriously, but I can’t take that offer.”
“You’re broke as fuck.”
She stared at him. “How do you know that?”
A laugh escaped him. “Because only broke people turn down an offer like that. People who can afford it never would.” His expression softened. “It tells me you’re a decent human being. Honestly, that makes me believe even more that you deserve it.”
The words hit somewhere far more tender than she expected. Her eyes burned, but she swallowed the tears before they could embarrass her. “This is…” She cleared her throat. “Can I at least bake you a cake or something? And can I help?”
His eyebrows climbed, along with the corners of his mouth. “You want to help me?”
“Yes, I could hand you... parts. And... tools.” She considered her options. “Or clean the shop. I can do that.”
“Alright.” Robin folded his arms. “What is a torque wrench?”
“Thaaaaat,” Liana dragged out the word while desperately searching her brain for anything remotely useful, “is a very interesting... bird. It is... native to Australia.”
Robin nearly doubled over laughing. “A bird?”
“Yes. It’s tiny. And yellow.” She nodded with complete confidence. “It is a very useful creature. It often brings things that are needed to the working crowd.” His laughter only got worse. “And,” she added, smiling when she caught the mischief in his eyes, “it loves to eat cherry pie.”
“Is that so?”
“Fascinating little critter.”
Robin looked at her for a moment, amusement still playing across his face. “Fine. Come back next week. Wednesday, alright?”
“Not on Tuesday?”
“Nope.” Someone inside the shop called his name, and he started walking backward toward the building. “See you next week!”
“Helga and I will be here.” Laughing, she waved before turning back toward her car.
“Helga?” Robin called.
When she looked over her shoulder, he was standing there with his head tilted, looking like a human question mark. She patted the hood of the old Honda. “Helga. My car.”
For a second, he fought the laugh threatening to escape. Then he turned around and hurried back inside.
“Great,” Liana muttered as she climbed back into the driver’s seat. “Now he thinks I’m an idiot.”
