Where were you standing when you heard the first shots? Did you see anyone before the shooting began? Did you recognize anyone?
No, no, no. The crosswalk. I was on the crosswalk. I looked and saw nothing specific and then, I was on the ground.
She wrote things down on a small notepad with a pen that clicked when she retracted it between questions. I focused on that click. The sound of it, that small, ordinary sound, was the most normal thing in my immediate environment. I held onto it.
Brock was somewhere nearby. I could feel him the way I'd learned to feel him—by the quality of the air, the gravity of his presence—even when I wasn't looking at him. He was managing something, speaking to someone, and periodically, he looked over at me and his eyes saidstill here. I believed them and went back to the woman with the notepad.
At some point, I became aware that we were moving. I wasn't sure when the transition happened—one moment we were at the barrier, then we were inside a vehicle, large, dark windows, not my car and not Brock's rental. Air conditioning. Seats thatsmelled like something neutral and institutional. Brock beside me, close, his shoulder against mine.
"You're shaking," he said.
I looked at my hands. They were.
"Shock," I said. Because I was a person who named things, who had always named things, and naming this one felt like the only available handhold.
"Yeah," he said. He reached over and took both my hands in his and held them. Not a romantic gesture. Something more fundamental—the physical grounding of a warm body against a cold one. I let him hold my hands and looked out the dark window at the airport going past.
Daniel's mother had pearls. She'd been wearing them at the church. She'd had her hands folded in her lap like she was praying her gratitude.
I pressed the heels of my eyes with the knuckle of my first finger and breathed.
"Is he—" I started.
"Yes," Brock said.
Just that. He didn't make me finish the sentence. He didn't qualify it or soften it or construct anything around it. He saidyesand let it be what it was, and I understood that this was the truest kindness available—not comfort exactly, not reassurance, but the simple dignifying act of telling me the truth.
"He covered me," I said.
"I know. I saw."
"He put himself—" I stopped. Started again. "He was carrying both bags. He carried both bags because that was Daniel, that was exactly Daniel, he always—" I stopped again.
Brock didn't say anything. He held my hands and let me find the end of the sentence or not find it. I did not find it, and that was all right. We rode in the dark-windowed vehicle throughthe Charleston afternoon and I thought about a man who had wanted Sunday dinners and had carried both bags.
"His mother," I said eventually.
"I know," Brock said again.
"My mother gave him her bread recipe. On an index card. At the rehearsal dinner." I heard my own voice and it was strange to me—too calm, too even, the voice of a woman managing something that was going to cost her a great deal more than it was currently charging. "She told him not to tell me. She'll want to know that." I looked at Brock. "Someone needs to find the index card. It was in his jacket pocket."
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I didn't have a category for—something that was not pity and not sorrow and was something more like the way a person looked at another person when they had just understood something significant about them.
“We’ll make sure someone finds it," he said.
I believed him. I believed him the same way I'd believedI'll be backin the dark—not because he'd proven himself over time, because we hadn't had time, but because he was the kind of man who meant the things he said. I had understood that very quickly about him and had not been wrong.
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
He was still holding my hands.
Outside, Charleston moved past the dark windows, going about its Sunday business. I rode through it in the aftermath of a day I did not yet have the whole shape of, holding onto the warmth of a man who had, apparently, sprinted toward something that was trying to kill me. I let myself be carried for a little while, because that was all I had.
Everything else could come later.
Later was a long way away.
For now, there was just this—the vehicle and the dark windows and his shoulder and the thermal blanket crackling when I breathed, and Daniel Whitaker's face, peaceful, on a crosswalk in the afternoon sun, not a mark of fear on it.
