Page 64 of The Shield
“You won’t,” I said, and I let him hear the certainty in it. “They’ll try to make you. But they can’t if we don’t give them a handle.”
He blew out a breath and let the weight of it go. “What else?”
“Everything,” I said, and rolled onto my stomach so my chin propped on my hands and I could see his whole face without craning. “I want you to go to Holly Hill. I want you at Granddaddy’s table before the week is out, eating cornbread and collard greens and arguing with him about zoning like that’s foreplay, because apparently in my family, it is. I want you to meet my dad and see his studio and smell the turpentine and the oranges he uses to clean his brushes. I want to stand in front of his big, messy canvases and confess the parts of my childhood that belonged to the city and the parts that didn’t. I want you to know every last boring thing about me.”
His eyes went softer and darker at once. “I’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight, if he’s awake.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I want something ordinary and pretty. Dinner somewhere I’ve loved since the city learned how to spell my last name.”
“Name it.”
“The Painted Crab on Shem Creek.”
“The one with the shrimp boats and the boardwalk you like?” he asked. He had listened when I rambled once about the way the light lays down flat on that water at dusk.
“That one,” I said. “I’m going to show my Montana boy what God meant when He invented seafood.”
He pretended to look nervous. “I’ll do my best with the little forks.”
“You’ll get one mallet,” I said. “Swing responsibly.”
He sobered a touch. “The cameras will follow.”
“They will,” I said. “That’s the new normal. If we run, we run straight through it. Let them film the part where we order hushpuppies and tip well and you pick shell out of my hair.”
“Okay,” he said. “We set our own story.”
I sat up, reached for the robe slung over a chair, and cinched it. “On another topic—the trip idea?”
“What trip?” His eyebrow lifted.
“Before the election,” I said. “Two quick runs, three days each, tops. Not junkets. Working trips. On my dime or the campaign’s if we do it right. Miami-Dade and New Orleans, maybe. Or Norfolk. Places that have had to grow up fast about water. We talk to their public works, their planners, their neighborhoods. We steal good ideas and credit them. We bring cameras because I’m national right now whether I like it or not, and if they’re going to point them at my mouth, I’m going to use it.”
He watched me, the faintest smile. “You want to turn the love story into homework.”
“Exactly,” I said, delighted he understood my particular kink. “If a network wants a segment, they can stick a chyron that says:Boring Heroics Tour. We’ll make ‘preparedness’ trend for a minute. And when I say we need to move money from pretty to necessary, I’ll be standing on a pump house in a city that already did and lived to tell the tale.”
He nodded slowly. “We’ll need to plan it so no one can say you’re campaigning on someone else’s tax dollars.”
“Kimmy will die of joy building a compliance spreadsheet,” I said. “You’ll meet me at Gate B while hiding your knife in your boot because you don’t trust the TSA.”
“I trust them to miss the knife,” he said, and I laughed into his shoulder because the joke wasn’t entirely a joke.
He caught my face in both hands and kissed me, not the way that had erased my brain before, but like a normal person whohad time. It felt so bare I could have cried. “We’re going to be okay,” he said into my mouth.
“We are,” I said, and let myself believe it.
We dressed like people who had a reservation. I tugged on a green dress and a denim jacket because Charleston doesn’t like you to look too serious. He pulled on a clean button-down that made me want to be rude to it later and boots that had survived worse creeks than Shem. I did mascara I wouldn’t regret in the salt air and slid the bear claw back under the collar where it could be private. He watched that, the way men who notice do, and said nothing, which somehow said everything.
On the porch, the evening smelled like washed wood and tide. The cameras across the street lifted as if on a string. We didn’t flinch. He took my hand like we were a normal couple in a normal town going to dinner on a normal night, which is to say, he took my hand like it was a fact.
Shem Creek had been its own mood as long as I’d been alive—shrimp boats bobbing like old men in church, gulls rude, dolphins lurking like insiders who already know where the good fish is. The Painted Crab sat blessedly between fancy and picnic, a place that made you feel like a local. The host did the polite-panic thing when we walked in, then remembered hospitality like a muscle and smiled wide.
“Out on the deck?” he asked.
“Always,” I said.
They put us by the rail. The rain had finally given up—just rinsed air and a faint, clean hush left behind. The marsh went green to pewter as the light slid. A pelican did an impression of a dump truck into the water and came up triumphant, looking pleased and prehistoric. A couple at the next table whispered and tried not to stare and then stared anyway when Ethan helped me sit as if my ankles were made of antique glass.
