Chapter 29
B y the third morning, back at Dad’s, St. Augustine had started to smooth my edges.
Atticus had left for a while—slipped out with a promise to keep a close eye, on me and on the street that wasn’t theirs to touch.
I woke to the oak tapping the screen and the smell of coffee drifting down the hall.
Dad hummed something old and off-key while he fried eggs.
The cottage held the quiet I’d come for. Not empty. Full of small sounds. The kind that let a body unclench.
Dad and I took our mugs to the beach and walked the hard line where the water kissed our ankles, then ran away. The sky wore a thin glaze of cloud. Pelicans glided low. Dad didn’t ask me anything I couldn’t answer. He let the tide set our pace.
The ache in me hadn’t gone. It had only moved deeper.
I could pretend it was distance that hurt. It wasn’t. It was the shape of a man who had taught my body a new language and then kept speaking it in my head. I kept my phone face down in my pocket.
I still felt the thread of Atticus like a wire. It hummed when I got too quiet.
After lunch, Grandpa came by with a newspaper under his arm and a list of opinions about the weather. He kissed the top of my head and sniffed the air like he could smell worry. He didn’t mention it, though. He told me the surf would be good at four.
I tried to nap and failed.
The quiet in my father’s house was kind.
My mind was not. It filled the room with Atticus.
The sound he made when he pushed into me.
The way his voice changed when he said mine .
The look he wore when someone crossed a line.
The blood on his knuckles. The gun on the nightstand.
The knock. The way he had said safe like he was naming a place he had built with his own hands.
I had so many questions that I’d love to know the answers to.
I got up because lying there felt like waiting for a storm. I told Dad I was walking into town. He offered the truck. I said no. I wanted the motion.
Foolish? Maybe, but I needed to move.
The road into the historic district ran under oaks that reached for each other like old friends. The air tasted like salt and sugar and rain that hadn’t decided whether to fall. I breathed and walked and pretended I could be a person who took a break and let it work.
When I got there, St. George Street was thick with people and laughter.
A line curled out of an ice cream shop that smelled like waffle cones and childhood.
I slipped into a bookstore with bowed wooden floors and leaning shelves.
The bell on the door rang and the owner looked up over small glasses, then gave me a nod that felt like a blessing.
I traced spines with my fingertips and tried to pick a book, as if reading could be a map out of myself.
I picked three and handed them over. The owner tucked a used postcard into the stack.
It had a picture of the fort and a smear of ink where someone had tried to sign their name.
I slid it into my bag and told myself to stop reading signs into everything.
On the way out, the bell rang again and someone brushed my shoulder.
I said sorry . The man didn’t. He was tall and narrow, with a face that would get lost in a crowd.
A washed baseball cap. A sweat-darkened shirt.
A scar like a fingerprint near one eye. He didn’t look at me. I told myself to keep moving.
I walked to the plaza and sat on a bench under a tree that had been there for more years than any of us deserved.
Street musicians cracked jokes about requests.
A bridal party squealed at a horse-drawn carriage and then did it again when the horse blew air through its lips.
I texted Darla a photo of the fountain and she sent back a selfie with a clay mask on and a caption that said self care is absurd sometimes .
I laughed out loud and the woman on the next bench smiled like she wanted to be in on it.
I stood to toss my cup, and that’s when I saw him again. The cap. The scar. Leaning at the corner by the artisan market where leather bracelets hung. He looked up at the same moment. Not a coincidence. He looked away, too fast. My stomach dropped. The world narrowed until only angles remained.
I told myself this was a tourist town. People overlap. Strangers aren’t always signs. I started walking back toward Dad’s house, anyway. I checked my sight lines the way Atticus had taught me without saying he was teaching me. Windows. Reflections.
My heart beat too hard. My palm went slick against my phone.
Shit. Shit. Shit .
I cut down a side street lined with old coquina walls and bougainvillea. The air was a little cooler there. Quiet in a way that should have been a gift. Footsteps sounded behind me and then stopped when I stopped. They started again when I did. The skin between my shoulder blades prickled.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t equipped for this. Not really.
I slipped into a courtyard with a fountain and a gate that almost squeaked.
I sat at a table and pretended to check my messages.
The man walked past the opening and didn’t come in.
He looked both ways like he was crossing a street that might be trapped.
He kept going. I counted to sixty. I did it again. My hands didn’t stop shaking.
Finally, it seemed I had lost him. Thank God.
I took the long way back to the cottage. When I got there, safely, I stared at the live oak until the beads jingled in the breeze and I could breathe without tasting metal.
Dad watched me from the porch. “You okay?”
“I thought someone was following me,” I said. My voice surprised me. Small and flat and very far from the woman who tells other women how to breathe when everything hurts.
He got up slow. “Describe him.”
I did. He listened carefully, then looked down the street and then back at me. “You want me to call the sheriff? Doing so seems like a good move.”
“No,” I said too fast. “It might have been nothing.”
“It might not have,” he said. He looked at my face and then at my hands, which hadn’t stopped trembling. “Come inside.”
I went. He poured water and cut a lemon and handed me the glass. He didn’t make me feel silly for needing two hands to lift it—a small kindness. He leaned his hip against the counter and waited. The kitchen ticked. The house held.
I could feel Atticus in the room like a ghost. I could hear his voice.
Stay where people can see you. Don’t give anyone a corner.
I could see the way his jaw would set if I told him what I had just done.
I could see his face when he looked down at my hands and then out the window and then at me again.
I went to the back bedroom and closed the door and sat on the bed with my phone. I opened our thread and stared at his name.
I typed. You just left. But I think someone followed me in town. I’m scared. Maybe you shouldn’t have left me. I stared at the words until my pulse hurt. I almost deleted them. I didn’t. I hit send and watched the screen like it might bite.
The house shifted and I flinched. It was only the air coming on. I laughed once, short and ugly. I needed to tell someone. I couldn’t tell Dad the whole of it.
I texted Mei. Quick question. Anyone been in the shop asking after me ?
Her dots appeared fast. A man came by yesterday. Baseball cap. Quiet. Wanted to know our owner hours. Said he loved small businesses. Smile didn’t reach his eyes.
My mouth went dry. Did you tell him anything?
No , she wrote. I told him we didn’t accept solicitations and then I called Reese in from the back and stood where the cameras could see us both. He left.
I sent her a string of hearts because I didn’t know how to say thank you without telling her too much. I asked her to send me the footage, just to see. She said she would and that she’d already made sure today’s shifts were covered by two people.
I closed my eyes and let the relief hit. I also let the fear do what it needed to do. It burned clean for a moment. Then it settled into a low heat I recognized.
Not panic. Readiness.
I turned the phone back over. The screen was blank. I stood and paced the small room until I made myself stop because wearing grooves is not the same as moving forward.
What now?
Grandma knocked and came in with a bowl of cut fruit and a lecture.
She sat on the end of the bed and patted my ankle and told me to let my dad walk me to the car at night like I was sixteen.
She also handed me a little can of pepper spray that had been on her key ring since 1998.
I kissed her forehead and told her it was a good color. She told me not to be stupid.
We went to their house for dinner because that was safer than anywhere that had a sign and a line.
Dad grilled fish in the small backyard while the windows glowed warm.
Grandpa told me the same story about a lightning strike on the bridge, and I let him.
The repetition calmed me. The fish was perfect.
The pie was cold. We watched the lighthouse cut the dark from the back step and, for a moment, I let the steady swing soothe what it could.
On the way home, I checked the rearview too often. The street was empty. The beads in the oak clicked when we pulled into the drive. Inside the house, Dad locked the door behind us and turned on the little lamp by the sofa.
I showered and stood in the steam until the mirror blurred.
I pressed my palm to the cool glass and tried to see the woman I had been before all of this.
Before Atticus. She lived there somewhere.
She wasn’t gone. She was only layered under heat and fear and want. She could be found. I told myself that.
In bed, I kept the window cracked.
My phone rang before I could decide if I wanted it to. I answered because there was never a universe where I would not.
“Lady.”
His voice filled the small room. It came through the line with a weight that settled my bones. The word landed low in me and turned everything I was into a single point that hummed. I didn’t speak at first. He didn’t need me to. He heard my breath and read it.
“Who?” he asked. Flat. Not a guess. A demand.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Baseball cap. Scar by his eye. Quiet. He might’ve been the same guy who showed up at the shop in Charleston yesterday. Mei handled it.”
“Good,” he said. No warmth in the word. Approval, yes. “Did you see him more than once?”
“Twice. Near the bookstore. Then again by the artisan market. I cut down a side street and lost him.”
“You didn’t lose him,” he said. Calm like a shore that has watched too many storms. “He let you.”
Ice went down my spine in a thin, precise line. “Why?”
“Because he wanted you to feel seen,” he said. “Because someone wants me to feel what it is to be hunted.”
“Why here?” I whispered. “Why my father’s town?”
“Because you left,” he said. Quiet. Not accusation. Fact. “Because my name pulls a certain kind of trouble, and when I’m not beside you, trouble sniffs for your edges.”
Anger showed up. Not at him. At the audacity of men who think a woman is leverage. It burned bright and fierce and gave me back a piece of myself.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What I’m for,” he said. “Close doors. Move pieces. Remind men that the cost of touching what’s mine is a bill they cannot afford.”
My breath hiked up my throat. “Atticus.”
“I am already on I-95,” he said. “Don’t open the door for anyone. Don’t leave your father’s house. Keep your phone on you and answer when I call.”
“You can’t just show up again,” I said, even as my body said yes, yes, yes . “My dad. My grandparents. You can’t bring that world to their porch. You’ll have to explain to them …”
“I won’t bring danger to your family,” he said. “I’ll bring an end to the part of it that thought it could step on their street.”
“That’s the same thing,” I said, but I could hear the lie in my voice. The part of me that had watched him in the warehouse agreed with him.
“Simone,” he said, and my name in his mouth was a hand on the back of my neck. “You did the right thing by telling me. You don’t run alone. Not anymore.”
I closed my eyes and let that land. I opened them and stared into the dim room and saw every shape twice. The lamp. The chair. The outline of my suitcase against the wall. The life I had tried to hold separate and the life that had already bled into it.
“I’m scared,” I said, because maybe the only way through was to say it out loud. “I don’t want this touching my people.”
“It won’t,” he said. The certainty in his tone was comforting, but only to a point. “Text me your father’s wireless password. Share your location with me. Keep a light on at the front window. I’ll call when I hit the bridge.”
The Bridge of Lions. The thought of him crossing that span, the light swinging out across the water, the marble cats watching him pass. It steadied me and shook me.
“Atticus?” I asked again. I didn’t know what the question was. I knew the answer I wanted.
“I’ve got you,” he said, like he had put his palm over my heartbeat. “And I’ve got them. Sleep if you can. If you can’t, lie down, anyway. I’m on my way.”
The line clicked off. The room went back to being a room. I set the phone on the pillow and lay on my side and stared at the window. The oak scratched the screen. A car hissed by on wet asphalt. My fear did not vanish. It learned to share space with something steadier.