Page 40 of Take Two

She looks up.

I watch it happen in real time. Her gaze moves over his face, the sunglasses, the hoodie, and then arrives somewhere that no combination of accessories can redirect. The moment of recognition crosses her face in a visible wave, slow and then all at once.

“Oh,” she breathes.

Cyaire goes very still beside me.

She presses one hand to her chest, the shopping bag momentarily forgotten. “Oh my God. You’re Cyaire Reed.”

Cyaire offers her the careful, practiced smile I have noticed him use before. Warm enough to be genuine, measured enough to manage. “Hi,” he says, with a small wave that tries not to draw the attention it is already too late to avoid.

The woman laughs nervously and glances over her shoulder toward a man standing a few feet away, engrossed in his phone. “I knew it was you. I told my husband it was you.”

I find myself wondering, in a detached sort of way, whether the collision was entirely accidental.

The man looks up from his phone at her voice, finds Cyaire standing there, and stares. Across the market, the change begins.

A couple walking past slows down long enough to look twice. Someone near the flower stalls raises a phone. The woman who recognized him catches the shifting attention and immediately looks mortified, her gaze moving between Cyaire and the people beginning to aim their cameras in our direction.

“Oh no,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”

No, you’re not, I think, keeping that thought entirely to myself.

“It’s okay,” Cyaire tells her, and his voice is genuinely kind. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

A flash fires somewhere to my left. Then someone calls his name, not quietly.

Cameron is already moving before I have fully processed the sound. The easy, deliberate distance he has maintained all evening vanishes in seconds. He steps smoothly into the space beside Cyaire, body angled to create a buffer between him and the growing attention without making anything look more alarming than it already is. No shoving, no visible tension. Just presence, deliberate and precise.

“Cy,” he says quietly.

Cyaire exhales, a short, controlled breath. “Yeah.”

“We need to move.” Cameron’s eyes are already working through the available routes.

Another phone rises at the edge of the crowd.

The woman steps back immediately, still apologizing in a low murmur as Cameron guides Cyaire forward with a hand hovering near his elbow, steering without contact. I fall into step on Cyaire’s other side without thinking about it, which probably says something I am not currently in a position to examine.

Nobody chases us. That is almost the strange part.

People don’t need to any more. They only need to stop, point, and record. By the time we reach the edge of the market, several phones are aimed in our direction, and the voices find us through the crowd.

“Cyaire, can I get a picture?”

“Is that Jamie Maxwell?”

“Are you filming something here?”

“Cyaire, over here!”

Cameron keeps his pace exactly right, fast enough to communicate that we are leaving without creating the kind of urgency that would draw even more attention toward us. I stay close on Cyaire’s other side.

Cyaire keeps his head down. The ease that has been sitting quietly in his posture all afternoon leaves him.

It goes in small, visible increments. His shoulders tighten. The smile disappears. Something in his attention pulls inward, retreating behind a door he had, I think, accidentally left open tonight. The openness that had been building across the afternoon folds itself back up neatly, and what remains is something more careful, more contained. More familiar to the version of him the world is accustomed to seeing.

By the time we clear the worst of the crowd and reach a quieter side street, the noise behind us has receded enough that I can hear him take a slow, deliberate breath.