And God help me, with the sunlight coming through the windshield and falling across her face, the only thought I had room for was that I had never in my life seen anything so beautiful.
5
MARY CATHERINE
The car smelled like coffee and something faintly mineral, like clean air and long distances. I sat in the passenger seat and watched Charleston slide past the window and tried to remember how to breathe.
My bouquet was in my lap.
I had no idea why I still had it. At some point between the altar and the sidewalk and the alley and this car, I had apparently decided that the flowers were coming with me. Now, they sat across my thighs, slightly crushed from where I'd grabbed the skirt of the dress to run, already beginning to look like a question nobody wanted to answer.
I set them on the floor of the back seat without looking at the man driving.
I didn't have my phone. I didn't have my wallet. I didn't have my ID or my keys or the small emergency cash my mother had pressed into my hand at some point during the morning in the way she always had, folded twice, slipped from her palm to mine like a secret. I'd left it in the bride's room on the vanity beside my lipstick.
I had seventeen pounds of ivory silk, a pair of heels that had already been ruined by Charleston brick, and a stranger in a baseball cap who had shown up at exactly the right moment.
Are you a pervert or something?
And he'd looked at me—and I'd watched something move across his face, something that wasn't offense or confusion but was closer to being caught off guard, the way you looked when a thing happened that your considerable preparation had not accounted for—and he'd said nothing. Just sat there with his mouth slightly open.
That had been enough.
"Folly Beach," I said.
He glanced over. "Sorry?"
"That's where I want to go." I was looking out the window. East Bay, the harbor flashing at the end of the streets. "Folly Beach. The pier, if it's open. I need to be near the water."
A beat of silence. The kind that wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, but had some weight behind it.
"All right," he said.
That was it. No clarification requested, no gentle suggestion that perhaps I ought to call someone first, no careful mention of the fact that I was sitting in his car in a wedding gown with an expression that probably warranted at least a follow-up question. He just typed into the car’s GPS, adjusted course, and drove, easy as that, like women in wedding dresses flagged him down on a regular basis and he'd long since made his peace with it.
I looked at him then. Really looked, which I hadn't let myself do yet.
He was large. That was the first thing and it kept being the first thing no matter where your eyes went—broad shoulders filling the driver's seat in a way that made the car feel smaller, forearms on the wheel with a solidity to them that spoke ofsomething beyond gym maintenance, like he'd spent years doing things that required actual physical force. He had a jaw that could have been carved, a ballcap pulled low, sunglasses still on even inside the car, and a quality of stillness about him that I found difficult to name. Not inert. Not passive. Something more like coiled. Like the stillness of a thing that had learned to wait and had waited a very long time and had made its peace with the practice.
Daniel was trim. Careful with his appearance in the way of men who understood that appearance communicated professionalism and professionalism was currency. His shirts were always pressed. He owned a shoe rack. He had a brand of cologne that I associated with him so completely that I'd smelled it once at a client event and thought of him immediately, reflexively, the way you thought of a word when you heard its definition.
I did not think I would ever associate this man with anything reflexive or comfortable. He looked like the kind of person things happened around, whether he invited them or not.
"I don't actually know if it's open," I said. "The pier. It was—there was an incident a while back. Everyone in Charleston knows the story. Something happened at Folly Beach Pier." I paused, aware of how imprecise I was being. "Some men—a group of them, connected to a private defense company here in the city. It was—there was an explosion." I shook my head slightly. "It's complicated. The kind of complicated that Charleston swallowed quietly and moved on from because Charleston is very good at that."
He said nothing. I couldn't see his eyes behind the glasses.
"They rebuilt it," I continued, mostly to fill the silence, or maybe because talking was the only thing keeping me on the right side of whatever was happening in my chest. "Better than it was, supposedly. New planking, extended length, better access.They did the whole waterfront area. It was a whole thing." I looked back out the window. "I haven't been since they finished it. I kept meaning to go."
"With him?" His voice was neutral. Not probing—just accounting for the context, the way a careful person accounted for things.
"Probably," I said. "At some point, we were probably going to go together and it was going to be very nice and I was going to take a photo to send to my mother."
Silence.
"That sounded—" I started.
"It sounded honest," he said.
