"Do you?" Ava's voice sharpened. "Because the man who asked me not to make a scene at his wedding does not get the benefit of the doubt for free."
Silence. Then Daniel said, quieter: "Can I see him this week?"
Ava closed her eyes. The emerald dress still hung in the closet of the rented room, a bright reminder that justice and spectacle sometimes wore the same clothes. "Thursday. Public park. Noon. You bring diapers and the willingness to look like a man who showed up late. If you charm a single stranger into thinking you're the devoted dad who's been there all along, I leave and you don't see him again until a court says otherwise."
"Thursday," Daniel said. "I'll be there."
She hung up before gratitude or apology could soften the terms.
The backstory did not begin in a church. It began, as many Savannah mistakes begin, on a humid Friday in a bar near the river where the music was too loud for careful decisions and the lights were too low for accurate character assessment.
Daniel Whitaker had been thirty-one then, newly promoted at the logistics firm that moved shipping containers through the port like a slow metal bloodstream, dark hair longer, beard less disciplined, tuxedo years still ahead of him. Ava Monroe had been twenty-nine going on armor, platinum hair already a signature, working as a junior curator at a small gallery that paid in prestige and insufficient rent money. They met when Daniel's colleague knocked a drink into Ava's emerald blouse — a different emerald then, cheaper fabric, same color preference — and Daniel apologized as if he had done the spilling himself.
He bought her a replacement drink. She let him. They talked about art and freight and the peculiar loneliness of a city that sold romance to strangers while locals navigated the ordinary failures of dating apps and delayed careers. He walked her to her car. She did not invite him up. He texted the next morning anyway, and she answered, and that was how eleven months began: dinners, gallery openings, weekends at Tybee when the weather behaved, a slow accumulation of toothbrushes and inside jokes and the assumption that affection, once established, would continue to negotiate fairly.