I did not offer to walk her in.
There are things a man knows in his bones, and one of them is that there is no version of a soaked stranger escorting a runaway bride up to a houseful of the family she'd justhumiliated that ends in anything but a scene, possibly a swung fist, possibly a phone call to people with badges. There ought to be a law against a grown man being seen within a hundred yards of a runaway bride. If there wasn't, it was an oversight.
"Can you let me out around the corner?" she said. "I can walk from there."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
I found a side street a block over, narrow and shaded, and the kind of live oak this town grows like a weed—huge, low-armed, dripping moss, throwing enough shadow to hide a parade. I pulled in under it and put the car in park. Quiet engine. Quiet street. The heater ticking.
She climbed up out of the footwell and back into the seat and sat there a second, gathering herself. I watched her do it—watched her pull the nerve up from somewhere the way you'd haul a bucket up a deep well, hand over hand.
"What would they think," she said, mostly to the windshield, "if some man none of them have ever seen walked me up to that door right now?"
"Nothing good."
A breath of a laugh, no air in it. "Yeah. You're probably right."
And the woman who'd jumped off a pier was gone. Just like that. The grin, the dare, the reckless shine—all of it drained out and left somebody smaller sitting in my passenger seat, shivering. Not all of it was the cold anymore. I'd seen the change come over enough people in enough doorways to know fear when it sat down next to me.
She was scared. Plain and simple and bone-deep scared of a blue door and the people behind it, and there wasn't a thing in my line of work that prepared a man to do anything useful about that.
I reached over and put my hand on hers where it sat fisted on her knee.
The jolt came again. Of course, it did. I ignored it. Or I told myself I did, which is the same lie a man tells about a lot of things.
"I'll walk you home," I said. "If that's what you want. I'll stand on the sidewalk and not say a word and let you do all the talking, and I'll be there if you need me to be. You just say."
She turned and looked at me, and her eyes had gone wide and bright and frightened. For one second, I'd have walked into that house and let her whole family take their swings at me, if it'd have made the next ten minutes easier on her.
Then, she shook her head. Hard. Twice.
"No," she said. "No. I have to do this part alone. If I bring somebody, then I'm the girl who left her wedding for a man, and that's not—that's not what this is. This is mine. I have to walk in there by myself."
Inside, in a place I don't let see daylight, I wished it weren't so. But the wishing didn't change the arithmetic. This wasn't one of my mother's pictures, where the music came up and the man got to be the answer. This was the real thing—a beautiful woman about to break a good man's heart and a houseful of hearts behind him, walking into it on her own two feet, the way the brave ones do.
She squared her shoulders. Gave a short, sharp nod, like a soldier who's decided.
"Okay," she said. "Time to nut up."
I laughed. Couldn't help it—it cracked right out of me, loud in the quiet car.Nut up.Out of that face, in that ruined ivory dress.
"What?" she said, almost smiling.
"Nothing. You're just—" I shook my head. Who in God's name was this woman? "Nothing."
She put out her hand. Formal. Like we were closing a deal across a desk.
So, I shook it. Her hand was small and cold in mine, that current running up my arm again. I pretended it didn't.
"It was nice to meet you," she said.
"Same," I said. And meant that one, too.
She got out. Worked herself back into the dress as best a person can alone—shrugged it up over her shoulders, reached behind her in vain for a zipper she couldn't reach and gave up on, left it gaping open down her back. Then, she did the last thing I expected, which by now should've been the only thing I expected: she turned in the shade of that oak and did a little spin, skirts and all, and faced me through the open door.
"How do I look?"