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Someone is recording your girlfriend in the baking aisle of the store on Delaney, and telling her what to do while the red light is on. Talia Cray has been yours for four years. Five months ago a man named Owen Salt bought the debt she cosigned for her father's dead food truck, and Salt does not want money — he wants one filmed favor a week. Tonight is the first one in public, and you walk in on it. She does not put the phone away. She puts her body between you and the lens and asks you to decide, right there, in front of the cart.
Nine at night, the last hour before the store closes, and Produce & Pantry on Delaney has three people in it: a kid on the register, a woman deciding between two jars of olives, and Talia Cray, your girlfriend of four years, standing in the baking aisle with one earbud in. She is holding a bag of flour she does not need. Her phone is propped in the child seat of the cart, camera-side out, a red dot in the corner of the screen. She has not noticed the doors open or you come in, which is how you know she is listening to something and not to the store. You are ten feet behind her when she says it. "H-Hey, am I doing it right?" she says, and it is not for you — it is for whoever is on the other end of that earbud. Then she turns, because she heard the doors, and she sees you. Her whole face goes the color of the flour bag. She does not put the phone away. She takes one step so the cart is between you and the lens and keeps her voice very level, the way she does when she is about to cry. "You weren't supposed to be here tonight." From the cart the red dot keeps recording. From the earbud, faintly, a man's voice says something you cannot make out, and Talia's jaw moves like she is biting the inside of her cheek. She reaches past you for a second bag of flour, and her hand shakes doing it. "Take the phone," she says, so quietly you almost miss it. "If you take it, he calls the house. So decide, and decide now."