Chapter 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 of something 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.
I looked at him again. His profile gave nothing away. The jaw, the cap, the road.
"I'm Mary Catherine," I said. "Most people call me that. Mary Catherine. All of it." I paused. "A few people call me Cat."
"Brock," he said.
Just the one word. No last name offered. I didn't ask for one.
Outside the window, the city was unwinding into the long, flat causeway that ran toward Folly Beach, the marsh opening up on both sides—silver-green water and spartina grass going gold in the spring light, the Lowcountry landscape that never entirely looked real to me even after twenty-nine years of living inside it.
Like a painting someone had turned up the saturation on.
I had driven this road a hundred times and it was different now—or I was different, which was the same thing.
I had left my own wedding.
The thought arrived clean and specific. I let it sit there for a moment because I had not yet actually said it to myself in those words.
I had left my own wedding.
I had walked down the aisle of Saint Sebastian's in the dress my family had saved for, and I had stopped walking and shaken my head and turned around and ruined what was very possibly the most expensive Saturday in the Donovan family's history.
Now, I was in a stranger's car on the way to Folly Beach and I had no phone and no money and my bouquet was on the floor behind me.
"You're not going to ask," I said.
"Ask what?"
"Any of it. Why I was running. What happened. Who I left behind."
He was quiet for a moment. "Figured you'd tell me what you wanted me to know."
I turned that over. Found it unexpectedly settling—the quality of it, the way it handed the situation back to me without judgment or agenda. I tried to remember the last time someone had simply waited for me to decide what I wanted to offer rather than arranging a space and expecting me to fill it.
I couldn't come up with a recent example.
"He's a good man," I said. "The one I left. I want to be clear about that. There's nothing wrong with him."
"Okay."
"Everyone will think there is. There will be—" I stopped. Thought about my mother's face in the front pew. "There will be a narrative. And the narrative will require a villain, because that's how people make sense of things, and Daniel doesn't fit that role and I won't let him be put in it."
"Who fits it?"
"Nobody," I said. "That's the problem. It's much harder to explain something when nobody's the villain."
He made a sound—not quite a laugh, but close to one. Brief, low, like something surprised out of him.
I looked at him again. I seemed to keep doing that, the way you kept touching a bruise—not because it was pleasant but because there was something clarifying about the ache of it.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." The corner of his mouth had done something. I couldn't tell from this angle whether it was a smile. "You're just—you think clearly, for someone who's currently doing something that probably doesn't feel very clear."
"I've been thinking clearly my entire life," I said. "It hasn't helped as much as advertised."
This time it was definitely a smile. Brief, contained, the kind that didn't ask you to respond to it.
Folly Beach arrived the way it always did—gradually, then all at once, the causeway giving way to the small grid of streets and the scruffy charm of a barrier island that had never tried very hard to be anything other than what it was.
Bungalows in faded colors. Surf shops. A taco place I'd been to twice.
The smell of the ocean reaching the car before we could see the water properly, salt and something darker and alive.
The pier was visible from the parking lot.
It was new—or newer, the pale wood still bright against the older weathered structures nearby, the renovation evident in the wider planking and the clean rail lines and the small covered pavilion at the end where the old one had just stopped and dropped you into open air.
They'd added lighting along the sides, strands of it wrapped at intervals, not lit now in the daylight, but visible as intention.
A family was fishing at the near end. A couple walking. A man with a dog.
I was out of the car before he'd fully stopped it.
Not running this time—I was done running, or I told myself I was—but moving with a purpose, the heels picking their way across the parking lot and then off, because I was not walking onto a pier in heels, I was not, and I bent down and unstrapped them and left them by the car and walked barefoot onto the new-wood planks of Folly Beach Pier in seventeen pounds of ivory silk like a woman who had completely lost the thread and was looking for it somewhere over the Atlantic.
The ocean hit me like a reset.
It always did. That was the thing about water—it didn't care what you'd done.
The sound of it, the smell, the endless, indifferent motion of it, the way it just kept going, regardless.
I had stood at this railing—or the old version of this railing, the one that was gone now—at various points in my life and let it do that to me.
Reset. Recalibrate. Start the breath over.
I walked to the mid-point and put both hands on the rail and looked out.
Behind me, after a moment, I heard his footsteps on the planks. He stopped a few feet back. Giving me space. I registered that without turning.
The water was the color it got in March—darker than summer, a deep gray-green, running white at the tops of the waves, the horizon a clean line under a sky that hadn't decided yet what kind of afternoon it wanted to be.
To the north, the shoreline curved. To the south, more of the same.
Out there, nothing—just water and light and the kind of distance that made your problems correctly sized for about thirty seconds.
I breathed.
"I was supposed to be in Dublin tomorrow," I said. Not to him, particularly. To the water. "I've never been. I've never been many places, really. I've lived most of my life inside a ten-mile radius and told myself that was enough."
He came up beside me. Not close—a respectful distance, elbows on the rail, looking out the same direction I was. In my peripheral vision he was very large and very still.
"Is it?" he said.
"Is it what?"
"Enough."
I looked at him. He was looking at the water.
"I left my wedding," I said. "What do you think?"
And there it was again—that almost-smile, faster this time, like he hadn't managed to stop it.
He turned his head and looked at me directly for the first time since the alley.
Even behind the sunglasses, I felt the quality of it, the attention in it, the sense of being looked at by someone who was actually looking.
"I think," he said slowly, "that it takes something to do what you did."
"It took a complete loss of rational judgment."
"Yeah." He looked back at the water. "That's usually what it takes."
I stood there in my ruined dress with my bare feet on the new planks of a pier that had been blown apart and put back together, and I thought about a phone call I'd refused and a canvas in a studio on Wentworth Street and a plane to Dublin I would not be on.
For the first time all day, I felt something that wasn't dread or grief or the nauseating clarity of an irreversible decision.
I felt, very faintly and with absolutely no idea what to do about it, like myself.