Chapter 7
MARY CATHERINE
The Atlantic in March was cold enough to be a decision.
I hit it feet-first and went under. The cold closed over my head like a fist. For one suspended, timeless second, I was nothing but sensation—the shock of it, the roar of the water in my ears, the total erasure of everything that had happened in the last four hours.
Then, I came up gasping, hair plastered flat, and I was laughing before I'd even gotten a full breath in.
I heard the splash behind me. Large. Decisive.
He surfaced about six feet away, shaking water off his face, baseball cap and glasses gone to the current, and I got my first real look at him.
I had been not-looking at him deliberately since the alley.
Cataloguing without committing. Letting him exist in my peripheral vision because full attention had felt like too much on top of everything else, like one more thing I didn't have the bandwidth for.
I had noted the jaw and the shoulders and the quality of his stillness and filed it all under irrelevant, not the point, focus on your extremely consequential life decisions.
In the water, with the hat gone and the sunglasses gone and nothing between his face and the March afternoon, I ran out of ways to not look.
He was—
The word that arrived first was much. As in, too much for the space available, too much for the context, too much for a woman who was supposed to be married right now and was instead treading water off a rebuilt pier in her underwear.
He had a face that had been through things.
Not broken—nothing so dramatic—just lived in, in the way of men who'd spent time in difficulty, in the kind of conditions that stripped everything nonessential and left only what had been there all along.
A jaw that could have anchored something.
Eyes, dark and direct, with the sunglasses gone, finally looking at me without any glass between us.
He was looking at me like I was something worth looking at.
My stomach did a thing that I elected not to examine.
"You're insane," he said. He didn't sound displeased.
"I know." I pushed the hair out of my face. "I feel incredible."
The laugh that came out of him was real and full and short, surprised out of him the same way the smile kept being surprised out of him, like his face had to catch him off guard to do it. "You feel incredible."
"Don't act like that's unreasonable. I just jumped off a pier."
"In March."
"In March," I agreed. "Off a pier. In my—" I glanced down at the water. "In considerably less than I started the day in."
The current was easy here—no pull, just the gentle Atlantic persuasion, and I was a decent swimmer.
Donovan family summers at Isle of Palms had seen to that.
I treaded water without effort, and the cold had already shifted from assault to something more like clarity, the kind that came with full-body exposure to something honest.
He was staying close without crowding me. I noticed that. The same instinct that had kept a respectful foot of rail between us on the pier was operating here in the water—close enough to matter, far enough for it to have been a choice.
I thought about Daniel, who would have told me the water was too cold and offered to rent a paddleboat instead.
I thought about Daniel and I felt—
Guilt, yes. The guilt was there, a real and present thing, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
Not guilt that I had left, but guilt that I had let it go so far before leaving.
Guilt for the dress and the flowers and the photographer and my father's jaw doing that thing with the expense.
Guilt for Daniel's face at the end of the aisle, open and undefended, with no reason to prepare for what was coming.
But underneath the guilt—and this was the thing I couldn't quite get my hands around—was something else. Something that had been very small and very quiet for so long that I hadn't known it was still alive. Now, it had air and was expanding into every available space, and it felt like—
It felt like the first day of something.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
“Sure.”
"Do you feel like a completely different person when you travel somewhere new? Like the city you're in doesn't know who you are, so you get to decide?"
He considered this seriously. He did that—considered things seriously. "Sometimes," he said. "Depends where."
"I've never done it." I turned onto my back and floated for a moment, the sky above me a pale and noncommittal March blue.
"I've never been anywhere nobody knew me.
Every room I've ever walked into in this city, there's been context.
Donovan's youngest. Patricia and Martin's girl.
Providence Academy's Mary Catherine." I let the water hold me.
"I've thought about just—going. Starting from nothing somewhere else.
New York. Miami. Somewhere big enough to disappear into. "
"Alone?" His voice had shifted. Not dramatically. But something had come into it.
"Maybe." I let the word float. "Why not? Get on a highway, see where it goes. No phone, no baggage—well, I don't have those anyway at the moment, so I'm halfway there."
"Mary Catherine."
Something about the way he said my name.
All four syllables, deliberate, like he was making sure I could hear the weight behind them.
I righted myself in the water and found him closer than he'd been, treading easy, his eyes on me with an expression that was not quite a frown but was in that neighborhood.
"No," he said.
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You're not hitchhiking to New York." Flat. Certain. The tone of a man who had decided something and was informing me of it rather than proposing it for discussion.
Something small and electric moved through me that had no business being there.
"I wasn't—I was speaking theoretically."
"Sure, you were."
"I was." I was, mostly. "And even if I wasn't, I don't believe I asked for your—"
"A woman alone on a highway with no ID, no cash, no phone." He said it evenly, like he was reading coordinates off a map. "No."
"You've known me for approximately an hour."
"I know." His jaw had done something. "Doesn't change reality.”
I stared at him. The cold water. The March sky. This enormous, sunglasses-less, hat-less stranger who had driven me to the beach and jumped off a pier after me and was now, apparently, appointing himself to an opinion about my solo travel decisions.
The reasonable response was to point out that I was an adult woman in full possession of my faculties who had made exactly one impulsive decision today and had done so on purpose, and that I did not require a man I'd met in an alley to weigh in on my theoretical itinerary.
What I said instead was: "What does reality say?"
Something moved in those dark eyes. "Says you've been making other people happy your whole life.
Says you finally did one thing for yourself and now you're—" A pause.
Brief. Like he'd had to make a decision about how much to say.
"You're not thinking straight yet. You need somewhere safe to land before you think about going anywhere else. "
I was quiet for a moment.
"That's very—" I started.
"Presumptuous. I know."
"I was going to say perceptive." I held his gaze. "It's annoying when strangers are perceptive."
A smirk. "Noted."
A wave moved through, gentle, and it closed the distance between us—not much, a foot or so—and neither of us corrected it.
I was close enough now to see the water tracking down the side of his face, the way the cold had brought color into his jaw, the dark of his eyes in the light.
Close enough to feel the shift in the water when he moved.
Close enough that when the next small wave came through and tilted me sideways I reached out automatically for something solid. My hand found his arm.
His forearm. Under the water, my fingers wrapped around it—just the reflex of a person catching their balance—and I felt the muscle there, the solidity of it, the living warmth of skin underwater. My whole body registered it as something significant before my brain had a chance to run interference.
I did not let go immediately.
I should have let go immediately.
He didn't move. Didn't pull back, didn't make anything of it, just let me hold on while I found my footing in the water, steady as a piling.
But I felt something go through him, barely perceptible—a shift in the stillness, the coil tightening—and I was suddenly, acutely aware of how much of both of us was underneath the surface and how little separated skin from cold water from the space between two people who had just met and were not behaving like it.
I let go. Found my own balance. Kept my face composed in the way I had extensive practice at.
"Thank you," I said, as though he'd handed me a pen.
“No worries,” he said. As though he hadn't felt it, either.
The sun had moved while we'd been in the water.
Lower, more gold, the afternoon shift that happened in March like the light had somewhere to be.
I became aware that we had been in the Atlantic Ocean for a while, and that I was cold in the way that crept up on you, and that I was going to need to get out of the water and deal with the fact that I had no dry clothes, no towel, and the only thing available to me on that pier was seventeen pounds of ivory silk.
"We should probably—" I started.
"Yeah." Already moving toward the pilings, toward the access ladder I could see bolted to one of the supports.
He went up first—and I noted that, too, the courtesy of it, the practical calculation in it—hauling himself up the rungs with an ease that indicated this was not a man who found ladders challenging. He reached back down for me with one large, open hand.
I took it.
He pulled me up in a single motion, the way you'd lift something half your weight rather than twice the expected effort. We climbed.
I came over the top of the railing and found my footing on the pier planks. His hand was still around mine for a second longer than the task required. His grip was—
There was no good word for his grip. It was complete. It was the grip of a person who, when they held on to something, meant it.
He let go. Stepped back. Looked at me with an expression that was doing several things at once, none of which he was going to say out loud.
I looked back at him in all his soaking, hat-less, undone-by-the-Atlantic reality and felt the thing I'd been trying not to feel for the last thirty minutes arrive in full.
He was extraordinarily attractive. And I was in a great deal of trouble.
The guilt moved through me again—Daniel's face, my father's face—and I let it. It was honest guilt and I owed it the space. But I also let myself sit, just for a moment, in the astonishment of it.
That I could have walked out of that church earlier today and be standing wet on a pier now, feeling something I hadn't felt in—possibly ever.
That this was a version of a day I had not planned for.
That I had been with Daniel Whitaker for three years.
Not once had my hand on his arm felt like that.
That was its own kind of answer to a question I hadn't known I was asking.
Brock picked up the dress from the railing with both hands, carefully—more carefully than I expected—and held it out to me. It was damp now from the spray. It would never be what it was. But he held it like it was still worth handling with some respect.
"Thank you," I said again.
He nodded once.
"For the record," I said, wringing water from my hair, "I wasn't actually going to hitchhike."
"I know," he said.
"You didn't know. You went full—" I gestured vaguely at him, at the breadth of him, at the expression he'd worn. "You went very serious very fast for a theoretical conversation."
"I take theoretical threats seriously."
"Is that a military thing?"
Something moved across his face. Brief. "What makes you say that?"
I looked at him. At the posture and the stillness and the way he'd read every turn of the street when we drove and positioned himself at the end of the rail where he could see both directions. At the way he moved through space like it was a problem he'd already solved.
"Lucky guess," I said.
He said nothing. Which was, by this point, its own form of confirmation.
I wrapped the dress around my shoulders like an extravagant, overpriced towel and looked out at the water one more time. I thought about New York and Dublin and Wentworth Street and a gallery owner who hadn't pushed and a canvas that had been waiting in the dark of a studio for me.
"I do need somewhere to go," I said. "Tonight. I have my studio—there's a sofa. But I'm going to need—" I paused. "I'm going to need a plan. I've never not had a plan."
"We'll figure it out," he said.
We.
He'd said it like it was nothing. Like it was simply the natural pronoun for the situation, as if two people who had just met in an alley had always been a we working on a problem together.
I looked at him sideways, this stranger who'd jumped off a pier after me and told me I wasn't hitchhiking and held my hand for one unnecessary second at the top of a ladder.
"You don't have to do that," I said. "You have your own—you came to Charleston for something. You aren’t from around here. I can tell—”
"It'll keep," he said.
And he said it with the ease of a man who had never in his life let anything keep for anyone, which meant he was choosing to let it keep for me. I didn’t know what to do with that except to feel it land somewhere in the vicinity of my chest and stay there.
"Brock," I said.
"Mary Catherine."
I almost smiled. Four syllables again. Deliberate as the first time.
"Thank you," I said. Which was starting to feel insufficient for the thing I actually meant.
He looked at me for a long moment, ocean behind him, afternoon light coming sideways across that carved and complicated face.