A Greater Love
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10
The mall was Jack’s idea, which he would later consider with some irony.
It was the right next step on paper. Étain had handled the grocery store. She’d handled two more solo trips since then, the second one without a list, just a short verbal description from Shawanda of what they needed. She’d come home with everything correct and one thing extra — a box of cookies she’d decided to buy on her own, which Shawanda had placed on the counter without comment and which they’d eaten over two evenings without discussing what the box represented.
The mall was a different order of magnitude. He knew that. He’d factored it in. What he’d underestimated was the specific way it would be different.
They went on a Saturday afternoon in November, three weeks after the hike.
Hillsdale Mall was twenty minutes from the Turner house, a mid-sized regional center with two levels and the standard architecture of controlled commercial chaos — anchor stores at the ends, specialty retail filling the corridors, food court in the center of the upper level radiating the combined smell of a dozen cuisines. On a Saturday afternoon in November it was operating at close to capacity.
Étain was fine in the parking lot. Fine through the entrance. Fine for the first ten minutes on the lower level, where the stores were less dense and the foot traffic was manageable.
Jack watched her calibrate. She moved close to him in the crowds — not touching, but close, using his presence as a buffer the way she’d learned to use it in the school hallways. He let her. Some things you scaffolded before you removed the scaffold.
He gave her the first task at a bookstore near the center of the lower level. “I need a birthday gift for my mom,” he said. “She reads literary fiction. Pick something.”
This was bounded and specific and played to what he knew was a developing interest of Étain’s. She’d been reading more since the library sessions, asking Dr. Reid for recommendations, finishing things in her own time rather than for assignments.
She spent eight minutes in the fiction section. Jack browsed nearby without hovering. She came back with two options and held them both out to him.
“You pick,” he said.
She looked at him. Then at the books. Then she put one back and brought the other to the register.
He paid. She carried the bag. Small. Clean. Hers.
It went wrong in the food court.
The food court hit her like weather.
They’d come up the escalator and Jack had felt the change in her immediately — a slight stiffening, the way her pace slowed by half a step, the way her eyes moved differently over the space. The food court was everything the bookstore wasn’t: loud, crowded, fragmented into a dozen competing inputs, every surface doing something different. Tables packed with families. Teenagers in clusters. A child crying somewhere near the pretzel stand. The smell of teriyaki and pizza and cinnamon competing for the same air.
“Where do you want to eat?” he asked.
She stopped walking.
Not a hesitation. A stop. Her eyes moved across the food court the way they’d moved across the pasta sauce aisle, but this wasn’t fourteen feet of sauce jars — this was an entire room of stimulation with no clear edges and too many variables and no obvious right answer. He watched her processing stall the way an engine stalls in bad weather. The options were too many and too loud and the crowd kept moving around them and she stood in the middle of it with her eyes going somewhere else.
He recognized it.
She was going away. Not all the way — not the areaway, not that far — but the beginning of the retreat, the mind starting to exit a situation the body couldn’t leave.
“Étain.” His voice was quiet. Not urgent. Just an anchor.
Her eyes came back to his face.
“Come with me,” he said.
He didn’t take her hand. He just turned and walked toward the exit at the near end of the food court and trusted she’d follow, and she did, and in ninety seconds they were through a side door and outside on a covered walkway that ran along the exterior of the building. The noise dropped by half. The crowd disappeared. The air was cool and smelled like November and nothing else.
Étain stood on the walkway and breathed.
Jack leaned against the railing and gave her the time she needed.
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