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Heather walks beside me with her empty canvas bags over one arm. Everyone sees a woman shopping with a man.

The first tomatoes I pick up are cold from refrigeration and hard enough to bounce. I put them back.

“Those are cheaper,” Heather says. She lifts one from the display and offers it to me.

I press my thumb near the stem. “So is eating the cardboard box.”

Heather puts it back where she found it. “Choose better ones.”

I take the cart to the smaller display at the end of the aisle. Heather follows, and I fill a bag with tomatoes that smell like tomatoes instead of cold water.

An older woman reaches around me for one. I move it out of her hand before she can drop it into her bag.

“Not that one,” I tell her. “It’s split beneath the stem.”

She turns it over and finds the crack. Then she looks at Heather and smiles as if the three of us share something funny. “Your boyfriend takes his vegetables seriously.”

Heather’s hand settles at the base of my spine before she answers. “He takes everything seriously.”

The woman laughs. “You’re lucky he shops.”

Her fingers spread against my back. “I chose him carefully.”

The woman takes the tomato I select for her and walks away without seeing anything worth saving.

I push the cart into the next aisle. Heather doesn’t remove her hand until I stop in front of the peppers. She lets me choose dinner. I replace the flour she buys with one that won’t turn bread into wall paste, add an olive oil that costs three times what hers did, and put two bottles of hot sauce in the cart.

Heather takes one bottle out. “You only need one.”

“They taste different.” I put it back beside the first. “Unless you want every meal to taste like Jamie picked the seasoning.”

She studies the two labels before leaving both in the cart.

I take us toward the meat counter. Every aisle gives me another person. A stocker cuts open boxes with a yellow knife. A mother argues with two children beside the cereal. The butcher knows enough about poultry to answer one question and gets three more because he was stupid enough to impress me.

Any of them could call the police. I ask the butcher whether the chicken arrived fresh, and Heather stands beside me and lets him answer.

At the register, she unloads the cart while I arrange the groceries on the belt in the order they should be bagged. The cashier puts the tomatoes beside a bag of flour, and I move them before she can crush them.

“He always this particular?” she asks Heather.

“He behaves when people do things correctly,” Heather says. She passes me one of the canvas bags. “Show her.”

I bag the groceries myself. The cashier watches me put the eggs on top and tells Heather she should bring me every week.

Heather pays, takes the receipt, folds it once, and slips it into her purse.

I push the loaded cart toward the doors. The community board hangs beside the entrance, crowded with business cards, guitar lessons, a church dinner and a flyer printed on white paper with the word MISSING taking up the top third.

The photograph beneath it belongs to Oliver. He’s wearing his glasses and a dark jacket, with one hand resting against a stack of books. His hair is shorter.

NATHANIEL PRICE appears beneath the photograph. The line beneath gives the date he was last seen, followed by a request to call his sister, Juney, with any information. The phone number is printed twice. I stop the cart close enough to read both copies.

The automatic doors open four feet away. A man carrying a bag of dog food walks through them, and cold air slides across the floor around my boots.

Heather stops beside me. She follows my attention to the flyer and reads every line without touching it.

I read Juney’s number again. I hold it the way I hold six modifications called across a kitchen, repeating each piece until it sits where panic can’t knock it loose.