Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
-Hamlet, V.I
She winds up in Charming after she flees Lakeside, Wisconsin, a town too tiny to be found on most maps that was filled gave prickled the hairs on Erin's neck, and before that Algoe, NY, which was weirdly desolate, and before that Chester's Mill, Maine, which was insular and afraid. Erin and Rosie only stay a week or two in each place, though Erin is plagued by possible threats; in Lakeside it's a guy who looks a little too much like hired muscle that arrives a little too conveniently; in Algoe it's a customer who always looks nervous when Erin comes near; in Chester's Mill it's a break-in at their apartment. There are many places before and between, larger and smaller, picked randomly by Rosie with a giant road map of America and a thumb tack.
She wakes up sometimes with the stench of human filth and fear settling into her nostrils, and she finds herself aching to call Dimitri or Harry or even Calum, but she can't, because while she's curled up in some low-rent shithole, they're out saving the world and her careful budgeting cannot take the strain of a phone call home (She knows Cal would make some quip about how far the mighty have fallen and that would break her). So she sits and shakes and sweats and remembers.
She puts Rosie in school at the first couple of places with hopes for roots and new beginnings, but now, with a new town every few months it mostly just serves as a government-mandated daycare until the next town comes along.
The diner isn't the worst she's ever worked, and it puts food in Rosie's stomach and a roof over her head. The owner is a middle-aged woman who insists on being called Auntie Lulu and who thinks Erin is a nice girl named Eleanor from somewhere in England who got into a bit of trouble. Erin only ever gives minimal details, Lulu fills in the rest of the story with her own imagination; turning Eleanor into a cobbled mosaic of Lifetime specials and Charming's traviata. Eleanor is a good worker who has a young daughter named Rosalind, keeps her head down, doesn't go to church, keeps to herself, and is willing to pick up more extra shifts then most mothers can.
The local motorcycle gang rides past the diner often, the rumbling of their motorbikes roaring angrily, making cups rattle in their saucers, like a small earthquake passing by. They don't come into the diner often, which makes limiting her exposure easier; after her own extensive googling, town gossip, and a favour called in to Dimitri with no questions asked, Erin had decided their connections with the government and organized crime made them too much of a risk to her and Rosie's safety.
There's two of them sitting on opposite sides of the booth, one with feathery hair, shoulders that scream Marine, and hands scarred with a spiderweb of tales. The other has his back to her initially, and in the curve of his back she sees a hunted man. When he turns she almost gasps; the man who recruited her had scars like that, and he told her how her got them; his 'Glasgow smile' Thomas had called it, and laughed.
'What would you like?' Erin can feel her fingers tighten around her pen and her nails biting into her palm. She can see Lulu flitting around in her periphery, carefully watching Erin, and she thinks perhaps Lulu is more observant then Erin gave her credit for.
'How'd you end up here?' the one facing the door asks, surprising her with an accent that is somewhere between Glaswegian and Belfast, but really, how does anyone end up here, in this small, dead-end town that is so full of possibility. The 'New World' they called themselves, and Erin could use a new world, so that's where she went. America, the place people go to disappear.
'The same way you did I imagine.' There is Section D and Harry and the Gavrick Affair and Ruth and China and everything going wrong. (She thinks it's funny, the first time they met Harry told her he was the sinking ship and she the rising star, yet here she is, in backwater America with a government pension that never quite covers all her bills and 'not fit for service' stamped across her record while Harry trots the boards at Whitehall making friends and influencing people.)
'I doubt that very much.' He smiles crookedly, the scars pulling his face face into a mirthless grin.
'You never know. Would you like some more coffee?' She adds this because no matter how much she wants to ask, she's not a spook anymore and waitresses don't ask those kind of questions.
He gets a refill and she gets a fifteen dollar tip tucked under his coffee cup.