He did not notice, from behind, the approach of a man carrying a baseball bat. The driver, dazed and bleeding, lurched his car out of the line and crashed into another vehicle on Bergen Boulevard. The attack was as brief as it was brutal, but it was long in the making. The yearnings of the heart don’t come with time stamps, and long-game acts of deceit and betrayal don’t lend themselves to simple when-and-where entries on police reports. The path to that drive-through begins in familiar territory: a lonely older man with some money in the bank and a younger woman who would come to separate the two.

Source: New York Times August 21, 2018 09:00 UTC