“Next year, at Carrigan’s” was her tiny private version of “Next year, in Jerusalem.” She’d always thought, Next year, I’ll have the courage. Next year, I’ll stop running, and go home to my family. But she’d always seemed to have a good reason to put it off, and now it was too late. Now, the only thing left was to say the goodbye she hadn’t said ten years ago.

Miriam locked up the warehouse and began walking home, hoping the long meander through the old city would help sort out her thoughts. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to fit a trip to New York into her current life. The storefront’s grand opening wasn’t until New Year’s Eve, but she would have to be back in Charleston as soon as shiva ended to prepare.

On top of the store opening, her fiancée, Tara, hosted or attended a seemingly never-ending stream of social events. Miriam was expected to appear at them all and schmooze. She didn’t know how Tara would react to her having to leave, even for a short time. Probably not well. Tara’s life was impeccably planned, and any variation perturbed her.

The tight schedule was good. No matter how nuclear things went at Carrigan’s, she had reasons to come back to Charleston immediately. An escape plan. At worst, she would have a really bad week dealing with everything she’d left behind, but it would only be a week.

Charleston’s Historic District was a town of ghosts, held at bay by the haint blue painted around doors and under porches. Horse-drawn tourist carriages clogged narrow streets, winding past the market that stretched for blocks, where you could buy artisan goods, Gullah-Geechee baskets, and so much food. Master builders renovated historic homes, churches older than the country flew Pride flags from their wrought iron fences, restaurants did molecular gastronomy takes on shrimp and grits.

It was a city full of people trying to tie their roots to their futures. Miriam, who had severed nearly all her roots and was making her future up as she went, was drawn to that. Charleston was a perfect place to lick her wounds, hide out, build a new version of herself that none of her family knew. The polar opposite of Carrigan’s, which had built her and knew all her secrets. Charleston wasn’t home, exactly, but it was a hell of a lot safer than Carrigan’s.

Yet just around that corner, there was a port with many of the country’s worst sins written on it, and you couldn’t walk a block without bumping into living, thriving injustice. Charleston’s charming gentility was a beautifully painted mask on hundreds of years of pain, its safety a facade.