Chapter 13
She almost didn't go.
Saturday mornings at the Sausalito farmer's market had become one of her rituals — the kind she was deliberately building, brick by brick, to replace the ones she'd lost. She went early, before the crowds thickened, when the vendors were still stacking stone fruit and the fog hadn't burned off the water.
She bought things she didn't need. Blood oranges she juiced standing over Alix's tiny sink.
Sourdough rounds she ate half of and froze the rest. Wildflower honey from a man with sun-cracked hands who remembered her name now.
But this morning she'd woken with a headache behind her left eye, the dull kind that meant she'd been clenching her jaw in her sleep again.
Thea's visit two days ago sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
Not what Thea had said about the Rhys dissolution — that was information, another data point in the long catalog of things Sebastian was doing that she hadn't asked him to do.
It was the other part. The part where Thea said he's doing it because he finally saw it, and something moved in her ribcage that she didn't want to name.
She went to the market anyway. Routine was the scaffolding. You didn't skip the scaffolding because you felt shaky. You leaned on it harder.
The air was cool and salt-heavy, the bay invisible behind a wall of white.
She parked on Caledonia Street and walked the two blocks with her canvas bag over her shoulder, the one with the broken strap she kept meaning to replace.
The market spread along the waterfront park in a loose grid — white pop-up tents, hand-lettered signs, the low hum of people who hadn't had enough coffee yet.
She stopped at the honey table first. Then the bread.
Then the woman who sold goat cheese wrapped in grape leaves, which Juliet had never once bought but always considered.
She was holding a half-pint of Early Girl tomatoes when she saw him.
Sebastian was standing three stalls down, in front of a fruit vendor Juliet had never noticed before.
He was holding a brown paper bag in one hand and reaching for something on the table with the other.
Persimmons. Hachiya persimmons, the kind you had to let ripen until they were almost translucent before you could eat them, the kind most people thought were disgusting because they'd tried them too early and gotten a mouthful of tannic chalk.
She'd told him that once. Years ago. They'd been at a dinner party — the Nakamuras', she thought, or maybe the benefit at SFMOMA — and the pastry course had been a persimmon pudding.
Sebastian had said he didn't like persimmons.
She'd said nobody liked persimmons because nobody knew how to eat them, and then she'd spent five minutes explaining the difference between Fuyu and Hachiya varieties while he watched her with that expression he used to get — amused, attentive, like she was the most interesting channel and he had no intention of changing it.
He hadn't seen her yet.
Her first instinct was to leave. Set the tomatoes down, turn, walk back to the car. She could come back next week. She could find a different market. Mill Valley had one on Sundays. She could restructure the entire scaffolding if she had to.
But her feet didn't move, and then he looked up.
The recognition hit his face in stages. Surprise first — genuine, unguarded, the kind you can't manufacture. Then something that looked like fear. Then a careful blankness, the boardroom mask she'd watched him build over nine years of marriage, dropping into place like a visor.
He was thinner. It showed in his jaw, in the way his collar sat.
The suit was charcoal, single-breasted, and she was almost certain it was the same one he'd been wearing at the gala two weeks ago.
Sebastian Lowell, who had a closet the size of her current bedroom organized by season and occasion, wearing the same suit twice in two weeks.
She didn't know what to do with that information.
He said her name. Not loudly. Not like a question or a plea. Just her name, the way you'd say it if someone appeared in front of you and you needed to confirm they were real.
"Juliet."
"Sebastian."
They stood there for a beat that lasted too long. The vendor between them — a woman in a canvas apron, her table piled with late-season stone fruit and those persimmons — glanced between them with the neutral curiosity of someone who sensed a story but knew better than to ask.
"I didn't know you came here," Juliet said. It came out flatter than she intended.
"I don't usually. I was—" He lifted the paper bag slightly, a half-gesture he didn't finish. "I was driving through."
She looked at the bag. Looked at the persimmons still on the table. Looked back at him.
"You're buying persimmons."
"Yeah." He had the decency not to explain.
She should have walked away. Every decision she'd made in the last three months — the cottage, the business, the ring left on the counter, the text that said don't write to me again — had been building toward a version of herself that could stand in front of this man and feel nothing.
Or at least feel only the clean, useful things: anger, resolve, the righteous clarity of a woman who had been wronged and knew exactly what she was owed.
But he was standing in a farmer's market in Sausalito holding a bag of persimmons because she'd told him once, at a dinner party neither of them could probably date with certainty, that they were underrated.
And he was wearing the same suit. And he was thinner.
And without the office, without Rhys, without the car and the driver and the glass tower on Battery Street, he looked like —
She shut that thought down before it finished.
"I'm going this way," she said, tilting her head toward the row of tents along the water. It wasn't an invitation. She didn't know what it was.
He fell into step beside her. Not too close. A careful eighteen inches of fog-damp air between them, the distance of colleagues or strangers or two people who had once shared a bed for nine years and now didn't know where to put their hands.
They walked past the flower stall. Past the olive oil vendor with the tasting spoons.
Past the woman selling hand-thrown ceramics that Juliet had been eyeing for three weeks — a set of shallow bowls in a matte sage glaze that would work beautifully in the hotel breakfast room.
She didn't stop. Stopping would turn this into something.
She wasn't ready for it to be something.
"Have you seen that documentary about the postal service?" Sebastian said.
Juliet almost laughed. Of all the things he could have said — I'm sorry, I miss you, please, any of the words she'd been bracing against for weeks — he asked about a documentary.
"The one on PBS?" she said.
"The one about the dead letter office."
"I watched it Tuesday."
"I watched it Wednesday."
They were quiet for a few steps. The fog was doing its slow morning retreat, peeling back from the waterline in layers. The outline of Angel Island showed now, gray-green and indistinct, like a photograph that hadn't finished developing.
"The part about the wedding rings," he said.
"I know."
She did know. The segment about the bins of unclaimed wedding rings — thousands of them, sent in envelopes with no return address, or found loose in the bottom of mail sacks, or recovered from packages that had split open in transit.
Gold bands with inscriptions nobody would ever read again.
The camera had lingered on them for too long, a slow pan across rows and rows of small circles, and Juliet had sat on Alix's couch with her hand over her mouth because she'd left her own ring on the counter of the Edwardian house three weeks ago and hadn't let herself think about where it was now.
"It was a good documentary," she said, which was the least adequate sentence she'd ever spoken.
"It was."
They reached the end of the market row and kept walking. The path curved along the waterfront, past the yacht club and the houseboats with their painted hulls and window boxes. She'd walked this route dozens of times since moving into Alix's cottage. She'd never walked it with anyone.
"The fog's been heavy this week," Sebastian said.
"It's July."
"It's always July."
She looked at him. He was watching the water, or the place where the water should have been — the bay was still more suggestion than fact, a flat gray shimmer behind the last gauze of fog.
His hands were at his sides. The paper bag of persimmons hung from his left hand, swinging slightly with each step.
"You look tired," she said. She hadn't meant to say it.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I said."
He exhaled through his nose. Not quite a laugh. "I'm not sleeping great. It's not — I'm not saying that so you'll feel something. It's just true."
"I know the difference."
"I know you do."
They walked. The boardwalk planks were damp under her sneakers.
A woman jogged past them with a golden retriever, the dog's tongue lolling sideways, and for a moment the scene was so aggressively normal — Saturday morning, waterfront, couple walking — that Juliet felt a vertigo she couldn't explain.
As if she'd stepped into someone else's life and found that it fit.
"How's the hotel project?" he asked.
"Good. We're past demo. Framing starts Monday."
"The hunting lodge? Up on the bluff?"
She glanced at him. "How do you know it's a hunting lodge?"
"Noor mentioned it at a thing. I didn't ask. She just — it came up."
Juliet filed that away. She didn't like that he knew details about her work. She also didn't like how much she didn't like it, because the intensity of the reaction was disproportionate to the offense, and disproportionate reactions were the kind of thing she'd been training herself to notice.