Klay followed her up the ramp and outside to the parking lot, noting the men turning to stare openly at her as she passed. Erin walked quickly. Her wild hair and pale skin, her athletic body in clothes that didn’t hide it, made her a constant target of male attention. He’d tried to get used to that during their time as a couple, but never had. He would glare into their wolfen faces, or pretend they didn’t exist. It never made any difference. He drove a shoulder through more than a few. That never made a difference, either. She’d laughed at him. “You think walking down a street full of leering strangers is hard? Try fighting off your parents’ friends, the college professor you looked up to,” she said. “Just about every male editor at every place I’ve worked, including The Sovereign.” He tried to imagine it, but he had nothing in his own life that offered a reference, so he went back to glaring and knocking into people.

But that had been years ago.

Erin oversaw what most people would call photo captions, but staff at The Sovereign referred to as legends. “God forbid a Sovereign photographer should touch a keyboard. And God help the journalist who thinks she can summarize a picture taken by a Sovereign priest,” she said. Her legends department wrote tiny stories, no more than forty-nine words long, about people, places, and animals they often knew little about. “I was Twitter before Twitter was cool,” she liked to say.

As they walked to her car, Erin’s perfume floated back to him, carrying memories of Sunday mornings in their house on Capitol Hill, drinking coffee while Aretha played on the stereo, reading the Washington Post, then wandering over to Eastern Market for fresh vegetables. An afternoon workout at the gym. An evening workout in their bed.