Liam left the hospital that night with Clara's hand still warm in the memory of his, and by the next afternoon he was walking the promenade in a cardigan, the kind of soft grey that did nothing to hide how little sleep he'd gotten.
The walkway ran along the edge of the district, wide enough for two lanes of foot traffic and a bike lane that nobody seemed to fully respect, lined on one side with young trees still tied to their support stakes and on the other with a row of shopfronts that changed character every fifty meters, a bakery giving way to a shoe repair place giving way to a shop that sold nothing but candles.
The afternoon light sat high and clean, the kind that came before the heat properly broke, and the walkway was full of it, full of people moving through their Tuesday the way people moved through Tuesdays, without any particular urgency.
An older man walked a dog on a leash too long for the width of the path.
