"Well," Izzy said.
"Don't," I said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
She pressed her lips together. The effort of not smiling was visible and largely unsuccessful. She looked at the bread in my hands, then at the space where he'd been, then back at me with the expression of a woman who had seen a great deal of life and recognized a moment when she was standing inside one.
I looked down at the bread. It was still warm through the paper. The sourdough smell was extraordinary—yeasty and deep, the kind of complex fermentation that took years to develop, the kind you could actually taste in the air before you'd broken the crust.
I had absolutely no idea what had just happened.
"He gave you his bread," Izzy said, with the careful neutrality of someone defusing something.
"He did."
"A stranger. Just—gave you his bread."
"And then left."
"And then left," she agreed.
We stood in companionable silence for a moment, both of us looking at the spot where he'd been. The bread vendor behind his now-empty table was watching us with the open interest of a man who considered his stall a front-row seat to the human condition. He caught my eye, shrugged philosophically, and began folding an empty basket.
"He was—" I started.
"Yes," Izzy said.
"I wasn't going to say that."
"You absolutely were."
I thought about denying it. Decided against it because she would see through it immediately and I was too tired from sleeping on a floor to perform dignity I didn't feel. "He was very?—"
"He was," she confirmed, with the authority of a woman who had made her peace with noticing things and didn't require them to be named precisely.
I started walking toward the market exit. Izzy fell into step beside me, her canvas tote swaying against her hip, green juice in hand, completely unruffled. That was something I was already appreciating about her—she moved through the world at thesame pace regardless of what the world was doing, which struck me as a skill I'd never fully developed.
"He was different," I said finally. "From the ones we saw earlier."
"How so?"
I turned it over in my mind. The men we'd watched through the juice bar window had that quality of alertness that read as professional—military, or former, or trained to something similar. They'd been reading the environment. He had been, too, I thought, but underneath it was something else. Something that had nothing to do with the street and everything to do with the woman standing in front of him.
He'd looked at me like I was a problem he hadn't expected to have.
"He had more—" I searched for it. "Weight. Like he was carrying something."
Izzy was quiet for a beat. "A lot of them are," she said. "The ones who've been at it a long time. It doesn't go away when they get out. It just—redistributes."
I thought about that. About what she'd said earlier—they move the world around you until it's safer. About the weight of a life spent inside that kind of purpose, the way it would mark a person in ways that didn't wash off.
"He was big," I said, because I was apparently committed now to this conversation and might as well be thorough.
Izzy made a sound that was half laugh, half acknowledgment. "They tend to be."
"And he had—" I stopped walking for a second, pressing my free hand to my sternum where something was still doing something it had no business doing. "It doesn't matter. He left."
