It was thevibe.Something in the way she carried herself—the self-possession, the warmth that was also a wall, the sense that she was fully formed and didn't need anyone to complete her but might, under the right circumstances, allow someone to try. An energy I'd felt exactly once before in my life, in a parking lot in Minneapolis, when a woman with dark hair and direct eyes had looked at me and I'd thoughtthat's the oneand I'd been right, until I'd been catastrophically wrong.
Rachel.
The name moved through me like voltage. Not the woman herself—she looked nothing like Rachel, not really, not in the specifics. But thefeeling.The frequency of standing in front of a stranger and knowing, in the place below thought, that this one could get inside you.
Fuck.
Rachel, who'd stood at the altar and said the words and meant them, or so I'd believed. Rachel, who'd curled against me in bed and said she loved me, and meant that, too, probably, for a while. Rachel, who'd stopped wanting me so gradually I didn't notice until the bed was cold and the excuses had calcified into a wall.
Fucking Rachel.
I looked at the bread in my hands. I looked at the woman with the brown eyes and the dark hair and the vibe that was already finding the cracks in a wall I'd spent three years building.
"On second thought," I said, "why don't you take the whole thing?"
I held the bag out. She took it—her fingers brushing mine through the paper, a contact so brief it shouldn't have registeredand did—and I saw something cross her face. Confusion, maybe. Or the beginning of a question she didn't get to ask.
I nodded to the proprietor, who was watching with the expression of a man who'd seen a lot of things at his bread stall but never quite this.
Then I walked away.
I didn't look back. That was a discipline I'd learned a long time ago, in places where looking back could get you killed. Different context. Same principle.
The market thinned as I moved toward the exit. The white tents, the voices, the smell of bread and flowers and fresh-cut herbs—all of it falling behind me like a city I was leaving, which I supposed I was, in a way.
The sunlight hit me as I cleared the last stall. Hard and clean, no canopy to soften it.
I walked.
Faster now. The morning's unhurried pace gone, replaced by something tighter—the stride of a man putting distance between himself and something he hadn't expected to encounter. My hands were empty. My chest was not.
Fuck.
Three years. Three years of building the wall, of training myself not to feel that specific frequency, of converting every soft impulse into hard discipline. Three years of telling myself that the lesson of Rachel wasn't that love was dangerous but that I was dangerous inside of love—that my need to possess, to hold, to keep was the thing that had driven her away, that my intensity was the problem, that a woman who stopped wanting you was a woman telling you something about yourself you weren't brave enough to hear.
And now a stranger with brown eyes and a bag of bread had sent a crack through the whole goddamn foundation in under thirty seconds.
No.
Whatever Charleston was selling, I wasn't buying. Not that. Not again. Best to deal with the Ethan situation. Go to Dominion Hall, hear the pitch, and make a decision based on something that made sense—mission, purpose, structure. The things I understood. The things that didn't betray you if you gave them everything you had.
I pulled out my phone. The address still glowed on the screen.
Dominion Hall.
Fine.
Let's get this over with.
7
LOUISA
He walked away.
Just—walked away. Long strides, no hesitation, no backward glance. The kind of exit that looked practiced, like a man who'd made a decision and wasn't interested in second-guessing it in public. Within six seconds he'd cleared the last tent and the morning swallowed him whole.
I stood there holding a bag of bread that had been his thirty seconds ago and tried to remember what my face was supposed to be doing.
