The boutique was called Sand & Sea, and it sold the kind of things that Figure Eight women bought when they needed to feel like they were supporting local business, linen dresses, shell jewelry, candles that smelled like the beach without actually smelling like the beach.
It was on the main street of Kildare, halfway between the marina and the ferry dock, and MC had never been inside it before.
The body had never had a reason to go inside.
The mind had a reason now.
He needed a picture frame.
For Wheezie.
A replacement for the sailboat print she hated.
The bell above the door chimed when he walked in.
The store was bright and white and smelled like sea salt and gardenia, and behind the counter was a girl in her early twenties with dark hair pulled back and eyes that assessed him the way a bouncer assessed someone at the door, trying to decide whether he was trouble.
“Can I help you,” she said.
Not a question.
A statement.
The statement said: I am required to say this, but I don’t expect you to be a real customer.
“I’m looking for a picture frame. Something for a bedroom. Not — not anything fancy. Just nice.”
“Nice.” She repeated the word the way you might repeat a word in a foreign language you didn’t quite believe.
“We have frames in the back. What size.”
He didn’t know the size.
He hadn’t measured.
The planning was incomplete because the mind was spending most of its energy on larger problems: the clock, the trap, the fragment, and the picture frame had been a tactical decision made in the hallway outside Wheezie’s door with no follow-through.
“Standard. Whatever standard is. Like — this big.” He gestured vaguely with his hands.
The girl looked at his hands.
Her expression shifted: a narrowing, a refocusing.
His hands were shaking.
The tremor was back, a fine vibration that he hadn’t noticed until she noticed it.
The withdrawal was always there.
The withdrawal was the body’s permanent companion, and it announced itself in moments like this: in front of strangers, in the middle of a transaction, when he was trying to seem normal.
She didn’t comment on the tremor.
She came out from behind the counter and walked toward the back of the store, and he followed her, and the following was awkward in the way that all transactions were awkward when you were trying to be a person instead of a Cameron.
“I’m Rafe,” he said, to her back.
“I know who you are.” She didn’t turn around.
“Everyone knows who you are.”
“That’s not — I wasn’t trying to — ”
“Impress me? Good.” She reached the frame section and gestured at a wall of options.
“These are the standard sizes. This one’s sixteen by twenty. This one’s eleven by fourteen. The wood ones are reclaimed. The metal ones are not.” She turned to face him.
“What’s the picture of.”
“I don’t know yet. Something she picks. She’s — my sister. She’s redoing her room. I told her I’d get her a new picture for the wall. The frame is the first part.”
The girl considered this.
Her name tag said SOFIA.
He hadn’t read it before.
He read it now, and the reading was deliberate: a way of saying: I see you as a person, not as staff.
The reading was also information.
Sofia.
The name matched one of the few things the show had shown about the working side of Kildare: the side that wasn’t Kooks or Pogues, the side that kept the island running while the rich kids fought over treasure and class lines.
“Sofia,” he said.
“That’s a good name.”
“It’s a name. You want the wood one or the metal one.”
“Wood. The reclaimed one. It looks — ”
“If you say ‘nice’ again I’m going to assume you don’t know any other adjectives.”
In spite of everything: the tremor, the anhedonia, the clock ticking in the back of his mind: he almost smiled.
“I don’t know many adjectives,” he said.
“But I know what I like.”
“Which is.”
“Things that look like they’ve been somewhere. Not things that look like they came out of a catalog.”
Sofia’s expression did something complicated.
She was still guarded: her whole posture was guarded, the way a person is guarded when they’ve been taught by experience that rich boys who walk into boutiques are either looking for a gift for their girlfriend or looking for entertainment, but the guard had loosened a notch.
She took a reclaimed wood frame off the wall and handed it to him.
“This one. It’s from an old dock in Wanchese. The guy who makes them pulls the wood out of the sound and cleans it up. Every frame is different.”
He took the frame.
The wood was gray and weathered and smooth to the touch, and the grain ran through it like a map of somewhere far away.
It was exactly the kind of thing Wheezie would like, something that had a story, something that wasn’t just another catalog purchase from a Cameron account.
“It’s perfect,” he said.
“It’s forty-five dollars.”
He pulled out the Cameron card.
The card was a reflex, and the reflex was a problem, swiping a black card in a boutique made him exactly the kind of person Sofia was guarding against.
He stopped.
He looked at the card and then at her.
“Do you take cash.”
“We take cash.”
He put the card back.
He had cash in his wallet, not much, but enough.
He counted out forty-five dollars in twenties and a five, and the bills were crumpled from being in his pocket.
The crumpled bills were better than the card.
The crumpled bills said: I am not performing wealth.
The crumpled bills said: this is a transaction between two people, not between a Cameron and a shop girl.
Sofia took the cash.
She didn’t count it.
She looked at him instead: a long, direct look that was neither friendly nor hostile, just assessing.
The look was the honest-man test, and he didn’t know it yet, but he was taking it.
“Your sister,” she said.
“What’s her name.”
“Wheezie.”
“Wheezie.” The corner of her mouth moved.
“That’s a name you don’t hear every day.”
“It’s a nickname. Her real name’s Louisa. But nobody calls her that.”
“And you’re — what. The brother who buys her picture frames.”
“I’m trying to be.” He wrapped the frame in the paper she handed him, and his hands were still shaking, and the paper crinkled under his clumsy fingers.
“I haven’t been great at it. But I’m trying.”
She watched him wrap the frame.
She watched his shaking hands.
She watched the way he handled the paper, carefully, deliberately, like he was aware that the moment mattered.
Then she took the frame from him and rewrapped it properly, her movements quick and practiced.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, not looking at him, “most guys who come in here don’t buy their sisters picture frames. They buy their girlfriends candles and then ask for my number.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“I wasn’t asking.” But she said it differently, softer, less guarded.
She slid the wrapped frame across the counter.
“Good luck with the picture. I hope she likes it.”
“She will. Thanks, Sofia.”
He left.
The bell chimed behind him, and the warm air of Kildare hit his face, and he stood on the sidewalk for a moment with the wrapped frame in his hands and the strange sensation of having been seen by someone who had every reason not to see him.
Sofia Perez.
The name was a thread.
The thread was not important right now.
The thread would matter later, in a different arc, when the clock had stopped ticking and the immediate crisis was resolved and there was space in his life for things that weren’t survival.
Sofia Perez stayed with him: suspicious, competent, unimpressed by Cameron money.
She’d make him earn every inch of trust, and the earning would take a long time, and the time would be worth it.
He got in the car.
The wrapped frame sat on the passenger seat.
The calendar said eleven days.
The plan was wrong but he didn’t know it yet.
The fragment from Barry was unresolved.
The attorney meeting was tomorrow.
He drove home, and the whole way, his hands shook on the steering wheel, and he didn’t try to stop them.