Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 86105 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86105 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
I recognize a feature in her that unsettles me. A version of myself I’ve been neglecting—the one who got into journalism not for access or prestige but because she believed a well-told truth could reshape how people saw the world. Somewhere between getting fired from Contour and agreeing to babysit a volatile hockey player, I stopped creating and started managing.
The woman leans back, loads her brush with a streak of vermillion so vivid it looks like a wound, and drags it across the center of her composition without hesitation.
It’s bold. Reckless, even. And absolutely as it should be.
A smile forms instinctively. Part of me wants to walk up to her and thank her, but she seems so at peace, I don’t want to disturb her. I keep walking, carrying her image with me like a small, sharp stone in my pocket.
Past the fountain, a couple strolls toward me on the path. Mid-twenties, I’d guess, her hand tucked inside his back pocket like she’s borrowing his warmth. He says something and she shoves him sideways gently with her shoulder, laughing. He catches her by the waist and pulls her back without breaking stride. It’s nothing, really, just a two-second exchange that means everything to them and nothing to the world.
Except the jacket. It’s his, draped over her shoulders, sleeves hanging past her fingertips. That old, wordless gesture—You’re cold, take mine—and it lands deep within me, in a part I thought I’d sealed off.
Connor used to do that. Give me his jacket before I even asked, like he had a sixth sense for when I was about to shiver.
Connor Marsh. The boy who sat behind me in sixth-grade history and passed me notes folded into triangles. We were twelve when he first held my hand, thirteen when he first kissed me. We survived junior high, high school, four years of long distance through college—him at UVA, me at Duke—held together by stubbornness and the belief that a love story that started that young could endure.
A year after college graduation, I found out he’d been sleeping with my childhood best friend for over two years. The girl who braided my hair at slumber parties and held my hand at my grandmother’s funeral. I lost them both in the same week. Twelve years of Connor. Fourteen years of her. Gone, like they’d been written in pencil, not pen, the entire time.
New York was my clean slate after that. A city loud enough to drown out the silence two people left behind. I funneled everything into my career with a ferocity my editors mistook for ambition. It was survival dressed in professionalism.
The couple passes me, oblivious to what their little interaction set off, his jacket still warming her shoulders. I don’t feel bitter anymore. I outgrew that particular poison, but the scar tissue is real. Trust, for me, is earned in increments and revoked without ceremony.
Elias is the exception. Everyone else starts at zero.
I start east, deeper into the park. The noise of the city dims but never disappears. You can still hear the rumble of buses on Central Park West, the distant wail of a siren, the endless drone of a city that’s always just one crisis away from boiling over.
It feels fitting as I mull over my meeting earlier with Grizz McAvoy. The man is all jagged edges and bad decisions wrapped in muscle and myth. In person, he’s bigger than the camera makes him seem. Not just physically—though, yes, there’s that—but in presence, he fills a room like he’s not sure if he should sit down or punch a hole through it.
Langley described him like he was a challenge to solve, but thirty seconds after meeting him, I realized he was a fuse waiting for the wrong spark. The fact he ended our meeting just moments after Langley left us to get acquainted tells me all I need to know.
This won’t be easy, but it’s a job.
I keep walking and emerge from the Ramble near Bethesda Terrace. There’s a wedding shoot happening on the steps—white dress, forced smiles, the photographer barking instructions like he’s conducting a battlefield instead of a fairy tale. To the left, kids are tossing pennies into the fountain. A couple of street performers breakdance for a circle of tourists holding iced coffees and recording it all on their iPhones.
As I get farther east, the park begins to dissolve around me once again. The gravel underfoot gives way to concrete, and soon I’m stepping out onto the corner of Fifth Avenue, where the world explodes back to life.
The quiet of Central Park is replaced by the hard asphalt pulse of the Upper East Side. Cars blare their horns. Pedestrians swarm the crosswalk with lowered heads and purpose.
I head east on 60th Street, weaving through the sidewalk gridlock. Every block is a battle between speed and image. I spot the restaurant, Le Soir, with its low awning and gold-lettered signage. An establishment that doesn’t advertise because its regulars already know where to go.