"I've been invisible for a long time," I said. It came out quieter than I intended. More honest than I meant to offer a woman I'd known for the length of a juice bar visit and a bread stall transaction. But she had that quality—Izzy did—of making honesty feel less like exposure and more like relief.
She didn't rush to fill the space the words left behind. She just walked beside me, and the quiet was the kind that saidI heard youwithout making a production of it.
"The people worth knowing," she said finally, "have a way of seeing you whether you want them to or not." A pause. "It can be alarming."
"It can be," I agreed.
She smiled. "I speak from experience."
We reached a corner where the street opened toward the water—a sliver of harbor visible between the buildings, the light on it doing the thing that light did on moving water, restless and bright and impossible to look at directly. The morning smelled like brine and cut grass and that bread that was still under my arm, warm and patient, waiting.
"Same time tomorrow?” Izzy said. "I can bring Marguerite. There's a good kitchen at the hotel—as good as what I have at home, honestly, because we renovated it for events. We can bake and you can tell me about whatever it is you're actually building here."
I looked at her.
She looked back with the mild, open expression of a woman who already knew the answer was yes.
"Tomorrow,” I said.
She tucked her phone back into her tote and adjusted the strap on her shoulder with the settled air of a woman who'd accomplished what she came to accomplish, which in this case was the farmers market, a juice, a bread stall, and apparently a new friend she intended to keep.
"And Lou," she said, as she turned toward the direction of the hotel.
"Yeah."
"For what it's worth—" she glanced at the bread again, at the space it occupied under my arm, at everything it had come with and come from. "Men who walk away like that usually come back."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
She smiled—warm and knowing and not even slightly apologetic—and lifted two fingers in a wave as she turned down the side street, tote swaying, completely at ease with the morning and everything in it.
I stood on the corner and watched her go.
Then I looked down at the bread.
It was still warm. The crust was beginning to dry at the top, the way sourdough did when the steam left it, the surface crackling almost imperceptibly into the architecture of good bread that meant the crumb inside was perfect and would be for exactly another six hours before it started to turn.
He'd given it up without hesitation. A stranger. Just—here. Take it.
And then left like the ground was on fire behind him.
I shifted it to my other arm and started walking back toward the apartment, back toward the notebook and the legal pad and the two words waiting at the top of the page.
The city moved around me, unhurried, indifferent, ancient.
Whatever Charleston was going to do to me, I thought,it was already doing it.
That was fast.
8
GRANT
By the time I reached Dominion Hall, I hated Charleston.
Not the city. The city hadn't done anything wrong. The city was old and beautiful and minded its own business, which was more than I could say for my own brain, which had spent the entire walk back from the farmers market replaying a thirty-second encounter with a woman whose name I didn't know and whose face I couldn't stop seeing.
No. What I hated was the feeling. The crack. The frequency of standing in front of a stranger and recognizing something that should've stayed buried, and knowing—the way you know a round has left the chamber before the sound reaches your ears—that you were in trouble.
