At the corner of Beatties Ford and LaSalle, there is a covered bus stop: Plexiglas walls, a metal bench, an old advertisement for a furniture store that closed last year. Bryce has passed it a thousand times.
Today, there is a woman on the bench. He almost walks past her. Almost. Something stops him at 36 cracks.
She is white, maybe 70, maybe older. She is wearing a cashmere coat the color of cream, soaked through at the shoulders, dark at the hem where it touches the wet bench. One pearl earring, the other ear bare. Her gray hair is half-pinned, half-loose around her face. Her hands are folded in her lap, but they're trembling—small, constant, like she's trying to hold onto something that isn't there. She is staring at nothing.
A businesswoman in heels walks past without looking. A teenager with AirPods glances over, then keeps moving. A delivery driver on an e-bike whips by and doesn't even slow.
Bryce stops. He has seen this look before. He saw it on his grandmama the last summer she was alive—the summer she started calling him by his uncle's name, the summer she kept asking when her husband was coming home, even though her husband had been dead for 19 years. The doctors had a word for it; Bryce was too young to remember the word, he just remembered the eyes.
This woman has those eyes.
He stands at the edge of the shelter for maybe ten seconds. Then he steps under the cover and sits down, careful, two feet away, the way you sit next to a bird you don't want to startle.
"Ma'am," he says soft, "are you okay?"
She turns her head slowly, looks at him. There's a long pause where it isn't clear if she sees him at all. Then her face does something: a small, tired smile. The kind of smile a person gives when they've forgotten where they are, but remember they're supposed to be polite.
"I'm waiting for Will," she says.
"Yes, ma'am. Is Will coming?"
"He's coming. He's just... he's late from practice." Her voice trails. "He's always late from practice."