I shoot the email off with aswooshand close my eyes again, exhaling slowly. Then I stand up, grab my purse, and force myself to walk out the door.
I make my way inside a little corner bistro called Framboise,a place near the office I used to frequent for lunch. I’m early, intentionally, so I take a seat at the bar and order a glass of Sancerre and a crock of French onion soup—but when the food arrives, I can’t bring myself to eat. Instead, I take my spoon and push down on the melted cheese, watching the brown liquid gush through the top and start to pool.
It reminds me of a footprint in pluff mud, swamp water leaking out.
I stare into the bowl, setting myself adrift for a second. I can hear the street getting noisier as the square comes alive with art school students walking home from class and young professionals sneaking away from their desks to catch a happy hour special. I vaguely register lights from outside twinkling in the distance; the clack of horse-drawn carriages pulling tourists to dinner across rough cobblestone roads. It’s a rhythmic sound, peaceful. Like the steady click of a metronome or a fingernail tapping against a glass pane window.
I feel my head start to bob, heavy, like it’s slowly filling with sand. Like soon my neck won’t be able to hold it on its own. Like it might topple over and break.
Click-click-click-click.
“Mrs. Drake?”
I jolt at the sudden closeness of a voice, my head popping up like someone yanked me back by my hair. I glance around for a clock and try to imagine how I must have looked, staring down at the bar top, a hazy mist coating my eyes for God-knows-how-long.
Five seconds, maybe. Five minutes. My body, here, but my mind, somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
“Sorry,” I say, looking up, blinking a few times to clear the fog from my eyes. “I was lost in thought for a second there—”
I have to squint to make out his face in the dim restaurant light, my eyes still bleary, and it takes me a moment to recognize him. It’s Waylon—of course it is, that deep, velvety voice—hovering just above the empty barstool next to mine. I rub my eyes, trying to pull it together. The bar is busier than it was when I first sat down; my soup, still untouched beneath me, already congealed.
“Do you mind if I sit?” he asks. I can tell he’s uncomfortable, like he’s intruding on a private dinner instead of simply showing up at the place and time we had agreed.
“Of course not,” I say, gesturing to the barstool beside me. I watch as he glances around the restaurant before self-consciously ducking his head as he sits, as if to make himself seem smaller. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”
“Are you kidding?” he asks, flagging down the bartender and ordering a whiskey on the rocks. “I dropped everything when I got your note.”
I take a sip of my wine. Back when I emailed him on Monday night, I wasn’t really surewhatI was proposing—just that I was open to trying something new, something different. Something that might actually work. He had responded within seconds, almost as if he had been sitting right there on his own computer, waiting for me. Willing me to hitSend.
“Savannah’s a cool town,” he says, his arms vaguely gesturing around us. It’s a well-intentioned attempt at small talk, I know, before diving into the real reason we’re here.
“It is.”
“Have you always lived here?”
“No,” I say, hesitating. I don’t really want to elaborate, but when Waylon is still quiet, still staring at me, I keep talking to fill the empty space. “No, I’m from Beaufort, South Carolina. It’s another coastal city, albeit smaller than Savannah. Port Royal Island.”
“What was growing up in Beaufort like?”
I stop and stare at Waylon, suspicion creeping into my chest.
“I’d prefer not to talk about that.”
Waylon raises his eyebrows, and I feel my heart begin to race, beating hard in my throat. I realize now that no matter how many times I’ve done this, no matter how many times I’ve told my story, this time, it’s different. This isn’t detached, standing on a stage somewhere and reciting the same thing over and over again to strangers at a distance.
This time, it’s personal. I have no idea what questions he might ask. I have no way to escape.
“Fair enough,” he says at last, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Let’s jump right in, then. Why don’t you tell me a bit about that night? How it started?”
He already knows this, I’m sure. He saw my keynote—besides, you can find it all through a simple Google search, an archived news broadcast, one of the hundreds of articles that have been written about that awful March night. I imagine he just wants to hear it all in my own words, unscripted, so I tell him about how I put Mason to bed, like I always do, around seven o’clock. How I read him a story, though I’m not sure which one it was. How I had turned on his night-light, blew him a kiss from the hallway, and closed the door behind me.
“My husband and I stayed up for another few hours after that,” Isay. “We watched some TV, had a couple glasses of wine. I poked my head in to check on him around eleven, saw that he was still sleeping, and then went to bed.”
“Did you hear anything strange during the night? Any noises?”
“No. I used to be a very heavy sleeper.”
“Used to be?”