Wide eyes. Open mouth. A man who'd just seen something he hadn't been prepared to see.
I splashed off the rock and jogged toward them, cutting them off in the wide spot where the canyon broke open enough for three abreast.
"Hey—hey, do any of you know CPR?"
They stopped. Three women, late thirties, the kind of friend group that took an annual trip together and posted the photos in matching captions. The one in the middle raised her hand a little.
"I know a little—what's wrong?"
"There's a guy back there—" I pointed up the canyon, breathless, hands on my hips. "I just found him. I don't think he's breathing. I tried to call but I can't get a signal?—"
"You don't get much signal in the Narrows," she said, the kind of unhelpful obvious thing scared people said.
"Shit. I'll go for help. Can you guys stay with him? Try CPR if you can?"
"Yeah. Yeah, of course. Where is he?"
"Side pool, hundred yards up, you can't miss it. He's wedged in some rocks, you'll need to roll him—" I let my voice crack a little, just enough. "Please. Please go."
"We've got it. Go."
"Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you."
I hit the trail downstream at a heavy jog, the kind that reads as panic and doesn't look like training. Made it around the first bend, out of sight, and let the jog ease into a steady wade.
One less weapons dealer in the world.
A good day's work.
I thought about my Americano with vanilla.
I thought about Hannah at King's Landing.
I thought about my mother, and the song I owed her, and the guitar leaning against the wall back at the rental.
I kept walking.
3
REBECCA
The wine bar was called The Piazza.
Not a plaza. Not a piazza like Italy, though that was closer.
In Charleston, a piazza was what everybody else in the world called a porch—long, columned, running the full length of a house, built to catch the cross breeze off the water in the days before air conditioning made suffering optional. I'd learned that from a historical marker I'd stopped to read on my third day in the city, still getting my bearings, still feeling the disorientation of a place that assumed you already knew its language.
The bar had taken its name seriously. The entrance was through an actual piazza—a long covered porch on the side of a narrow three-story building on Queen Street, strung with low Edison bulbs and lined with wrought iron chairs that were mostly full on a Wednesday evening. People sat with their glasses and their conversations in the warm amber light, the city moving quietly past them on the sidewalk, and the whole thing had the feeling of being invited into someone's private world. Itwas charming in the way Charleston kept being charming at me, unexpectedly and without apology.
I stood at the entrance for a moment longer than I needed to.
The email had said six o'clock. It was five fifty-eight.
I had my guitar case on my back and my good boots on—the brown leather ones I'd bought secondhand at a shop in Pigeon Forge the summer I turned nineteen, the ones I'd resoled twice because they fit my feet like they'd been made for them. I'd worn my dark jeans and a cream-colored top that Tasha had talked me into borrowing, which was nicer than anything I owned outright. My long, brown hair was down. I'd curled it that morning with Tasha's iron before she woke up, just a loose wave, nothing too done.
I looked fine. I knew I looked fine.
I just didn't quite believe it, yet.
