Page 33 of His Wall

I went back to the kitchen.

I thought about Claire.

Specifically I thought about her leg against mine under the table at the restaurant. The line of her thigh through the navy of her dress. The warmth of it through the cotton of my trousers, the half-second on the sidewalk afterward when her gray eyes had dropped to my mouth and stayed there. The car horn. The breath she had let out when Declan honked. The half-inch lean toward me she had not stopped herself from making.

I thought about the man on the sidewalk before that. Someone from a long time ago. She had not said that to me. I had said it to myself in the car on the way home from the restaurant, again in bed that night and again at 5:00 a.m. today when I’d given up on sleep.

I rubbed the back of my neck.

I grabbed my jacket off the chair by the door.

I needed to get out of this apartment.

The coffee place on the corner had a line out the door because it was Saturday, and the Saturday crowd was the slowest one. I waited eight minutes. Mara at the counter recognized my order and made it without asking — a flat white, no sugar, in the cup with the green logo I always took because I liked the weight of it.

I walked the three blocks to the park.

The trees were full of June leaves. A kid on a tricycle was making a slow loop around the fountain. Two old men were on the bench by the dog run. The running path was busy — joggers, a couple with strollers, a woman walking a beagle that was trying to eat a leaf.

I cut onto the path and started walking the river loop. I did not run. Claire had been right about that, although I was never going to admit it.

I was halfway down the long stretch by the railing when I saw her.

Dark hair down to her shoulders. A black tank top. Black running leggings. White running shoes. Skin flushed at the cheek and at the collarbone where the tank dipped. Her hair was loose and heavy around her face, half-stuck to her temples with the sweat she had run into it.

I had never seen her hair down.

I had never seen her arms.

I stopped walking.

She was running at a pace I would not have been able to hold for a minute let alone the distance she had clearly been holding it. Earbuds in. Her face had the closed-off concentration of a person running away from a thing instead of toward one.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Quick. Sharp. She scanned the path behind her. Her eyes did not stop on any one person. They came back in front.

I jogged twenty yards to catch her.

I came up on her left side and matched her pace and she startled.

She was actually startled. Her shoulders came up. Her right hand went to her left ribs. Her head whipped toward me and for a half-second her face was one I had never seen on her — hard, alert, the eyes flat, the mouth a line. Her right hand was halfway to a place on her body where I would not have expected a hand to go.

Then it was Claire.

The shoulders dropped. The hand fell. The face smoothed out one feature at a time, mouth and jaw and eyes, until she was the woman from my office again. She ripped the earbud out of her left ear.

"Mr. Cross."

"It's Saturday, Claire. Julian."

She slowed down to a jog, then to a walk. I did the same.

She glanced over her shoulder again.

"Are you waiting for someone?"

"No."