Page 11 of The Beast
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 shakenmy 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.
