One rainy afternoon in August, Jean Booth scurried up the stairs of a nondescript Thai restaurant tucked into a strip mall off the highway, shook out her blue, shoulder-length hair and took out her phone. She bit her lip; no messages.
Her boyfriend, Donnie, was due to arrive at the airport in a matter of hours, but Jean hadn’t heard from him all day. This little hole-in-the-wall was a pit stop on the way to their new life together. She’d been forced to move into her dad’s house in Ohio since her life fell apart in the spring, in no small part because of Donnie. She told herself that if Donnie didn’t call or message by the time this lunch was over, she’d write him off forever.
