The desert at night was a different country.

Riley Castillo had driven this stretch of highway so many times she could have done it half-asleep, and tonight — eleven-fifteen, the end of a double shift, the smell of grease and coffee still in her hair — she was close. The Mojave spread out on both sides of the 15 like a dark ocean, flat and enormous and humming with its own frequency. No cities. No glow. Just the white line of the road and the stars overhead, so many of them that a person from Los Angeles would have stopped the car.

Riley didn't stop for the stars. She stopped for the hazard lights.

They were blinking orange about a quarter mile up, just barely off the right shoulder. Silver car. New. She could see from a distance that it sat wrong on the passenger side — the rear end tilted toward the asphalt with the particular dignity-free posture of a flat tire.

She pulled up behind it without thinking twice. Barstow instinct: you stop. You always stop. People left to figure out the desert alone on a weeknight at eleven got into trouble, and the trouble was always worse than whatever it cost you to pull over.

The man crouching next to the wheel stood up when her headlights hit him. He was tall, dark-haired, wearing the kind of jacket that had no business being this close to a highway shoulder. He shielded his eyes.

Riley climbed out, leaving her engine running and her brights on so he could see what he was doing.

"You good?" she called.

"Define good," he said.

She walked around the back of his car. Silver Audi. Rental sticker on the bumper. The rear passenger tire was completely flat — not a slow leak, a real collapse. He had the jack out, positioned wrong.

"You're going to want to move that," she said, crouching.

"I was just —"

"You've got it under the rocker panel. You want the pinch weld. There." She pointed. "Otherwise you'll crack the floor when you lift it."

He stared at her. Not rudely. More like someone recalibrating something.

"Do you want me to —" he started.

She was already repositioning the jack.

He crouched down across from her, watching. He didn't offer to take over, which she appreciated. A lot of men did that thing where they offered to take over what you were already doing perfectly well, as if observing the work for thirty seconds had conferred expertise.

"Do you have a lug wrench?" she asked.

He went to the trunk and came back with it. She had the wheel off in twelve minutes.

The spare was in decent shape. She fitted it, tightened the lugs in a star pattern, lowered the car back to the road, tested the wheel with both hands. Solid enough to get him to Barstow.

When she stood up, she found him still watching her.

"You're going to want to take it slow," she said, pulling a shop rag from her back pocket — she had worked enough shifts to always have one — and wiping her hands. "That's a space-saver spare. Don't push past fifty."

"How did you know how to do that?"

"Same way anybody does. Someone showed me."

He put his hand out. "Mason."

She shook it. Her hand was still dusty from the tire. "Riley."

"Can I —" He reached for his wallet. She stepped back.

"No."

"I was just going to —"

"I know what you were going to do. Don't." She said it without heat. It wasn't an insult. It was just the truth of the thing.

He put the wallet back. He looked at her for a moment that ran a beat longer than most people's looking.

"Can I at least buy you a coffee somewhere? There has to be somewhere."

She checked the time. Her feet hurt. The grease smell in her hair was going to take two washes. Dottie's alarm was set for midnight meds, and if Riley wasn't home before it went off, her grandmother would get up herself rather than bother anyone, and the last time that had happened she'd caught the edge of the coffee table with her shin in the dark.

"Raincheck," Riley said.

"You don't know me. You won't know to collect."

She smiled. Just briefly. "I'll figure it out."

She walked back to her car. When she pulled out and passed him on the shoulder, he was still standing there with his wallet in his hand and a look on his face that she filed under not my problem and drove away from.

The stars filled the windshield. The highway ran straight and black. She turned the radio up and thought about nothing at all until she pulled into Mesquite Pines and saw the lamp on in lot 14 and knew Dottie was still up, which meant Jeopardy had run long and the world was exactly what it was.