No shadow.
No consequence.
Which should’ve been a relief.
Instead, my stomach dipped with disappointment so sharp it felt like humiliation.
“You idiot,” I whispered to myself, and the word bounced off glass and clean surfaces and the perfect, expensive silence I’d chosen because I thought it would make me feel like an adult.
I kicked off my boots and padded to the window. Outside, Charleston glittered in that soft holiday way—quiet streets, distant laughter, a carriage clip-clopping past like the city was selling itself a fantasy.
I pressed my palm to the glass and felt the chill seep into my skin.
The thing I’d invited didn’t come.
But it didn’t leave, either.
It stayed inside my head like a live wire.
And the closer Christmas got, the more my body reacted toeverythinglike it was a sign.
A man’s laugh in a restaurant.
Footsteps behind me on the Battery.
A stranger’s gaze held half a second too long.
I kept waiting for the moment the world shifted.
For the moment my front door became a threshold between who I was and what I wanted.
It never happened.
Christmas came, and I spent it at my friend Harper Maffetti’s house, perched on a velvet couch with a glass of champagne while her family argued lovingly over board games. Harper’s husband, Luca—sweet, earnest, entirely safe—called me “Lia” the way people do when they think they’re grounding you in the version of yourself they prefer.
“How’s work?” he asked, refilling my glass like he could pour normalcy into it.
“Busy,” I said. “Always.”
Harper’s mother hugged me and told me I looked thin. Harper’s father asked me if I’d met anyone “serious.” I laughed. Deflected. Smiled.
I didn’t tell them that my body had been on edge for weeks because I’d written one letter and it had changed the air around me, even if no one else could see it.
I didn’t tell them that sometimes, late at night, I stood in my own kitchen barefoot and tried to imagine what it would feel like to hear my lock turn from the outside.
I didn’t tell them that the thought made me wet with shame and heat and something dangerously close to hope.
After Christmas, Charleston slid into that strange lull—tourists thinning out, the city exhaling, everyone pretending they were resting while quietly scrambling to reset their lives for January.
Work didn’t slow down.
If anything, it intensified.
Violence didn’t take holidays. Neither did the donors who wanted to feel helpful without ever getting their hands dirty. Neither did the politicians who called me when a headline went bad and wanted a statement that sounded like empathy but didn’t cost them votes.
That was what I did.
I was the woman cities hired when blood was on the pavement and they needed to look like they cared.
