Chapter 3: Seven Years of Floorboards

The folder stayed on the table.

Evander went to work.

This was, he told himself, not avoidance. Avoidance implied awareness of something being avoided, a conscious skirting, a detour taken with one eye on the thing you were not looking at. This was simply his routine. He opened the shop at half eight, worked through the sorting backlog from the weekend — two bin bags of donated paperbacks, a box of engineering manuals someone had clearly decided represented a phase of their life now concluded — and assisted three customers before eleven without incident. The collarbone scar did not itch. The rain had moved south. The day was perfectly ordinary and he was in it.