She was about my age, dark-haired like me, with the kind of bone structure that photographs never fully captured and the easy confidence of a woman who'd long since stopped wondering how she came across in a room. She wore a linen dress the color of sea glass and carried a canvas tote already half-full of market finds—a bunch of herbs, something wrapped in brown paper, a jar of something amber. No makeup, or so little it didn't register. A ring on her left hand that caught the light when she moved.
She had warm eyes. The kind that assessed you without making you feel assessed.
"The habanero mango," she said, nodding at the bottle I was holding. "It's the best one. I've been buying it for two years."
I looked at the label again. "The acidity ratio is interesting. Most commercial hot sauces overcorrect with vinegar and kill the fruit."
She blinked. Then she laughed—quick and genuine, surprised. "That is not a sentence I expected today."
"Sorry. I think about fermentation a lot."
"No, I love it." She tilted her head. "Are you a chef?"
"Chemist. Food science. I work in bourbon."
Something shifted in her expression—a small, interested recalibration. "Bourbon." She said it the way people said it when they meant something by it. "Are you here for work or?—"
"Both," I said. "Mostly work. New in town."
She nodded at the tote on my arm, which contained exactly nothing because I'd arrived at the market by accident and hadn't brought anything to carry purchases in. "First time at the market?"
"First time in Charleston."
"Well." She extended her hand. "Isabel Dane, but you can call me Izzy. I'll consider it my civic duty to make sure you don't miss anything."
I shook it. "Louisa Fentress. Call me Lou."
"Lou," she repeated, like she was filing it somewhere useful. "Are you hungry? There's a bread stall at the end that's going to ruin you for grocery store bread permanently, and I was about to get fresh-squeezed juice next door, anyway."
I looked at the end of the market, then back at her. A woman I'd known for ninety seconds, in a city I'd arrived in eighteen hours ago, offering juice like it was the most natural thing in the world.
In Kentucky, you didn't do that. You knew people for years before they offered you anything that wasn't already socially obligated.
"Yeah," I said. "Juice sounds good."
The place next door was small—a handful of tables, a juice bar with a machine that looked capable of processing half the farmers market in one pass, a chalkboard menu handwritten in careful letters. We ordered at the counter.
Izzy got something green with ginger that she ordered by name like she'd been coming here for years, which she probably had. I got a straight cold-pressed orange because I hadn't eaten yet and my body was running on floor-sleep and optimistic drip coffee and needed something honest.
We sat at a table by the window. The morning moved past the glass—people with their farmers market bags, a dog straining at a leash, a man on a bicycle who looked like he was in no hurry and was doing everyone a favor by proving it was possible.
And then two more of them. Military men, or former, or something in between—I was already learning to recognize the posture, the quality of alertness they wore like a second skin. These two were younger, laughing at something between them,easy with each other the way people were when they'd been through things together. Both unreasonably good-looking in that same uncalculated way. One of them glanced through the window as they passed and I glanced down at my juice before I could be caught looking.
"They're everywhere," I said, before I could think better of it.
Izzy followed my gaze to the street, then looked back at me with an expression that was somewhere between amused and knowing. "You noticed."
"Hard not to."
She smiled into her green juice. "There's a reason for that. Charleston has Joint Base Charleston nearby—Air Force and Navy, between them. And then there's—" she paused, choosing her words in a way that suggested she was editing for a stranger, "—a certain community of people in the private sector here. Ex-military, mostly. A lot of them settled here after they got out."
"Your husband," I said. The ring had done the telling earlier.
"Ryker." She said his name with the weight people used for the person who'd changed the entire shape of their life. "Former special operations. He runs a private security firm now. Dominion Defense." She gestured loosely toward the direction of the water. "He and his brothers—there are several of them—they're all cut from the same cloth."
"Brothers?"
"Brothers in every sense." She smiled. "You'll understand if you spend any time in this city. They're—" She searched the ceiling for the word. "A presence."
