The humidity of the city clung to my skin like a second, unwanted layer of clothing. I stepped off the curb, dodging a taxi that honked with aggressive indifference, and hurried toward the brownstone on 12th Street.
My shoulders felt like they were carved from granite, a permanent souvenir of three months spent hunched over a drafting table. I was twenty-three, an aspiring architect with a degree and a chronic case of anxiety that manifested as a knot between my shoulder blades.
Franklin was the only person who knew how to undo that knot.
He was fifty-two, with a presence that seemed to slow down the frantic pulse of the city the moment I entered his orbit. He wasn't a licensed therapist in the clinical sense, but he possessed a knowledge of the human body that felt ancestral. He had a
