Maybe it’s the silver hair. Maybe it’s the quiet. Maybe it’s the way a woman in her late sixties can walk into a room without performing for anyone and still unsettle everyone in it. I had watched that mistake happen for decades. In courtrooms. In hospital rooms. At funerals. At family dinners where some fool thought age had softened me into irrelevance.
Age does many things.
It does not do that.
By 2:14, I was dressed. By 2:18, I was backing out of my driveway in my old navy sedan with my purse, my reading glasses, and the kind of calm that tends to frighten people who are counting on panic.
Ashby County at that hour looked hollowed out, all dark storefronts and red lights changing for no one. I passed the church where Natalie had sung in a Christmas pageant when she was eight, the pharmacy where I used to pick up my husband’s blood pressure medicine before he died, and the brick office building where Adrian had opened his first development firm and posed for a business magazine under a headline about “vision,” as though greed had hired itself a publicist.
Adrian Cole was the kind of man people admired because they had never had to live inside his weather.