And when I loop back twenty minutes later she still hasn’t looked up, or if she has she’s not letting me see it, and I decide that’s fine.
That’s actually perfect.
Because this is day two and I’m not in a hurry.
I have a whole month.
So does she.
5
HANNAH
He slows down when he runs past me.
I notice because I’m a details person. Twenty-four years of reading a courtroom teaches you to track the small things, the tells, the moments people think they’re unobserved. I clock the slight reduction in his pace without looking up from my book, which I am reading, actually reading, and not using as a prop to avoid acknowledging my neighbor.
I turn a page.
He’s gone by the time I look up, which I do eventually, just to check the horizon. That’s all. The horizon.
He circles back twenty minutes later and this time he stops.
Not close, about ten feet away, at the edge of comfortable conversation distance, hands on his knees catching his breath. He looks up and finds me already looking and I don’t bother pretending otherwise because I’m too old for that particular performance.
“Room for one more?” he asks, nodding at the sand beside me.
I should say no. I came to this beach specifically to be alone with my book and my thoughts and the ocean, and Cruz Jackson is none of those things. He’s the opposite of quiet. He’s the opposite of uncomplicated. He’s thirty-four years old with a jaw that should come with a warning label and he slowed down when he ran past me and I noticed and I am not going to make good decisions here if I don’t establish some boundaries.
“Sure,” I say.
He drops down beside me, not too close, forearms on his knees, looking at the water. He’s breathing normally again within a minute, which is mildly annoying. I close my book around my finger to hold the page.
“Good run?”
“Good beach,” he says. “I forget every year how different it looks in person versus photos.”
“You photograph it a lot?”
“Comes with the job.” He pauses. “The other job.”
I find I like that distinction —the other job— the way he separates the two things without apologizing for either of them.
“What are you working on right now? The architecture.”
Something shifts in his posture. Barely perceptible, but I catch it. A kind of settling, like a question he didn’t expect to get asked.
“Coastal preservation project up near Corolla. Trying to design something that works with the erosion patterns instead of against them.” He glances at me. “Most developers want to fight the water. I think you have to design like it’s going to win eventually.”
“Because it will.”
“Because it will,” he agrees. “The house that lasts isn’t the one built to resist. It’s the one built to adapt.”
I sit with that for a moment. There’s something in it I’m not going to say out loud.
“Tell me about the firm,” he says. “How you built it.”
So I do, but I don’t know why exactly, except that he’s looking at the water while I talk and it’s easier to say true things when someone isn’t watching your face for the reaction. I tell him about the first office, which was a converted spare bedroom in my house with a secondhand desk and a laptop that overheated in summer. I tell him about the years when I worked until two a.m. after the girls were in bed, about the cases I took for free because I recognized the look on a woman’s face when she’s been told by the system to be patient, to wait, to accept less than she’s owed.
