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Teenage girls are made of venom. All fangs, all teeth. It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen had once said, that those young women who are very rich and very pretty are also predisposed to becoming monsters from the moment they learn the power of winged eyeliner and a killer set of heels.
Well. She’d definitely said the first part.
(Blair Waldorf is made of more venom than most.)
.
She’s eighteen when she gets into Yale.
She’s eighteen when her boyfriend tells her that he’s going to be sleeping with other people, at least two, and she’s more than welcome to join in if she wants.
She’s eighteen when her family loses all of their money. Almost all of it. Enough of it to count.
She’s eighteen when her family loses so much money that she can’t go to Yale; she’s eighteen when her entire life plan, sixteen pages and written on gold-leaf monogrammed parchment, is thrown directly off of its axis and into some back-alley Brooklyn gutter. She’s eighteen when she ends up at NYU while Serena goes to Brown, while Nate goes to Dartmouth, while Chuck gets syphilis fucking models in a helicopter in Milan.
She’s nineteen when the world implodes, explodes, pieces itself back together.
She’s nineteen when she moves in with Daniel Humphrey.
.
Addendum—she’s nineteen when she moves in with Daniel Humprey in a Brooklyn loft that smells like e-cigarettes and depression because it’s the only thing that she can afford, and she can only afford it because he’s a friend of Nate’s and had offered an insane deal that had made it less expensive than the chlamydia-laden halls of student housing.
They know each other from some sports-related thing, Blair thinks. Or had it been music? She hadn’t really listened; she’d stopped listening as soon as Nate said that the apartment was located in the neighbourhood equivalent of New York’s unwashed hipster armpit and didn’t really tune back in until the end of the conversation.
“Vanessa had to move out last minute,” Nate tells her over the phone, and Blair remembers how Nate had said they knew each other once more. The best friend of his current fling, as if this situation couldn’t get any more tragic. “So he’s kind of desperate.”
Obviously, Blair had responded. Desperation and Brooklyn are practically synonyms.
He doesn’t seem desperate now that she’s seeing him in person. He seems excited to have her there, taking her on a tour of the loft as though it’s a grandiose mansion and not the exact location of where all of her once-lavish dreams of an upper-class future were going to die.
“So,” Dan says, throwing his arms open wide as if presenting her with some sort of immaculate gift instead the rust-stained, exposed-brick backdrop to her poverty-stricken nightmares, “what do you think?”
She thinks:
Dan Humphrey is a bit short. A bit unkempt. Deliberately, obviously dishevelled and tangibly pretentious. Not in the way that Blair is pretentious—not in the Manhattan way, the Upper East Side way, the way that harkens to old money and homes in the Hamptons that are fully staffed despite being used for only two weeks of the year—but pretentious in the old, spine-cracked books that line the walls and the coffee rings on his (no doubt second-hand) table.
Serena would like him, she thinks. Serena would see him as something to play with, his puppy-dog eyes and unfettered Brooklyn ignorance. She gets why Nate likes him, too; Nate, who had always been so desperate to be anything other than who he was. Daniel Humphrey is Nate’s opposite. His foil, in a very Shakespearian sort of way.
Dusty. Rumpled. Middle-class. Her economic equal, by some cruel twist of fate that Blair has yet to fully wrap her head around. Her potential roommate, apparently, although that still remains to be seen. She might strangle him before the deal can actually go through.
He’s still waiting for an answer, so she motions at the bookshelves.
“I didn’t know people from Brooklyn could read.”
“Oh, we can’t. Those are just backups for when I run out of rolling papers.”
Not a beat skipped. Interesting.
Interesting enough to prompt Blair to move the conversation along. “I like it,” she finally offers, waiting for his smile to grow and his eyes to brighten before continuing. “It’s got a unique sort of poverty-porn charm that’s completely in style right now. Quick question: is the cholera included as part of the utilities the utilities, or is that just a fun little add-on after signing?”
If he’s bothered by her remark he doesn’t show it. “Nate told me you were funny.”
“No he didn’t. He told you I’m a bitch.”
“I wasn’t aware that the two are mutually exclusive. You don’t have to live here, you know. I’m sure there are still some dorm rooms left.”
Blair sniffs, refusing to justify his words with a response. She’s not sure what Nate’s told him about the desperate reality of her situation, but she’s sure that he’s told him something; girls that look like she does don’t allow their Manolo pumps to touch rat-infested streets if something catastrophic hasn’t happened.
And really, she can’t begin to imagine it. Blair Waldorf in a dorm. The concept alone is enough to make Brooklyn seem like Paris.
This isn’t the destination, she reminds herself.
This is a step along her way back.
“It isn’t awful.” She says after a moment. “Do with that information what you will. We’re going to need to set some rules for cohabitation if this is going to work, namely that I’ll be in charge of…well, everything. The contents of your fridge look like a New Jersey dump and I think I saw one of your downstairs neighbours digging in the garbage—”
“That’s Chris. He’s a freegan.”
She scrunches her nose. “I didn’t ask.” A pause, and then. “What in God’s name is a freegan? Actually, ignore that. I’d rather continue to live in blissful ignorance.”
Dan takes a step towards her, a step into her personal space, a step so close that she can nearly feel the static electricity jumping from his skin and onto her own. Too close. A list starts growing in her head—cheap coffee, vanilla, firewood, parchment, maple syrup, ink. Things that he smells like. Things she thinks his skin might taste like. Things she immediately wants to forget. He grabs her hand. Her skin is burning. She—
He presses the keys into her palm.
“Blair,” he says, and if she were anyone else she might delude herself into thinking that his voice is fond. “Welcome to Brooklyn.”
.
She’s never hated anyone more.
.
When the nights are quiet and sleep eludes her she has a habit, a nasty one, of thinking about all of the things that she could have been.
If her father hadn’t lost all of that money. If her mother had loved her a little bit more gently. If she hadn’t been born with a thrumming in her chest and an ambition that had driven her towards recklessness. If she’d been prettier. If she had legs like Serena’s and boobs like Serena’s and…well, if she’d been Serena. If she’d been born into that body, she could have done anything.
But she wasn’t, and she didn’t. Instead she’s five-foot-four and thin, flat-chested, pale and beautiful enough to be noticed but easily ignored in favour of tall blondes with wide smiles. She had to be cruel, because if she wasn’t—if she giggled and preened and twirled a curl around her finger then no one would notice her in Serena’s shadow. If she wasn’t unkind then she wasn’t anything. If she didn’t dig her freshly-manicured nails into all of the things that she wanted, then she would never be able to make them stay.
What did Albert Einstein once say? That the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once?
Constants and variables. Changing and unchanging. All the things that could have been but never will, because her feet are tangled up in sheets that definitely aren’t satin, the fabric scraping across her calves when she shifts and rolls.
That’s the thing about Brooklyn, though.
The nights are never quiet.
.
The first (real) thing she learns about Dan Humphrey:
He keeps ungodly hours.
At six-thirty in the morning—on a Sunday! Those are the Lord’s hours, thank you very much—she wakes to clattering pans and blaring prog rock that makes her want to claw her own eardrums out. It takes her a while to realize that the off-key-but-somewhat-tolerable voice singing along is that of her roommate, and how one person can have so little regard for the sanity of another is utterly beyond her. When she’d said that only uncouth savages with the social skills of an uneducated orangutan came from Brooklyn she hadn’t known just how accurate her statement had been.
He’s doing this to torture her, she thinks. He must be. That’s the only explanation for all of this, and it becomes abundantly more likely when she steps out of her bedroom to find him standing shirtless in their kitchen, flour and egg yolks smeared across the countertops like a particularly tragic knock-off Pollock painting.
“Humphrey!” she shrieks, acutely aware that her hair is piled in a messy bun on top of her head and she’s wearing her Snoopy pyjama bottoms, for fuck’s sake. “Were you dropped on those pathetic Muppet-curls as an infant?”
“I’m making waffles!” he yells over the music, as if that explains everything.
“I don’t eat carbs before noon,” she says, and then, “Good God, have those spindly little hipster hands never held a whisk?” before marching over and snatching the utensil out of his hands.
Dan looks shocked but only for a moment, recovering in time to reach behind himself and turn the volume of his Bluetooth speakers down, quiet enough so that Blair no longer feels as though the droning chords of teenage angst put to music are permeating into her brain. At least he has some semblance of decorum, if only a bit.
“Where’d you learn how to bake?” he asks, passing her the sugar without complaint when she holds out an expectant hand, almost as if he can read her mind. Disconcerting. “Nate led me to believe that you’d grown up in the New York version of Buckingham Palace.”
“Versailles would be much more accurate.”
“Apologies, Your Highness.” He continues to watch over her shoulder, ever-present, annoying. “Seriously, though. Don’t you have like, a professional catering team to whip up a soufflé for you whenever you ring a tiny little bell?”
The truth:
Dorota had taught her. While her mother had been busy drinking herself into a stupor before sunrise and her father had been off fucking random men in Lyon it had been her housekeeper-slash-nanny-slash-surrogate mother who stood behind her in the kitchen, harsh accent softened by gentle words as she instructed Blair on the subtle differences between a crêpe and a blintz. And she had been happy, Blair thinks, because she had been loved.
But she can’t tell Dan all of that because it’s immensely personal and highly embarrassing, equivalent to letting him know that the first time she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s she’d cried so hard as Holly sang that her mother had called the family physician, terrified that her only child was entering a fit of depression from which there would be no return.
“I’m from the Upper East Side,” she says instead, as if this provides any sort of explanation. “Being naturally gifted at everything I do is essentially my birthright.”
Dan laughs.
If her lips twitch up at the corner, just slightly, Blair prays he doesn’t notice.
“Sorry for waking you.” He sounds disconcertingly sincere. It sets her on edge. “My last roommate was almost never home, and I’m just used to being a—well. It doesn’t matter. I’m still sorry.”
I’m used to being alone, Blair thinks, although her lips stay sealed shut and her eyes stay focused on the batter, on the kitchen counter, on the absolute fucking mess that Daniel Humphrey has made of their shared living space, on absolutely anything except for him. If she looks at him she thinks that she might feel empathy, kinship, and that’s far more horrifying than any mold-ridden Brooklyn loft could ever be.
So she shoves the bowl towards him, batter thoroughly mixed, praying that he doesn’t see the flush rising on her makeup-free cheeks or the fondness that permeates between the golden-brown flecks of her eyes. Because it isn’t, of course. Fondness. Couldn’t be.
“Add the chocolate chips, Humphrey,” she says, voice clipped but noticeably lacking the venom that it typically contains. “And please tell me that you have some champagne, because I’m making mimosas. You’ve already ruined my sleep schedule; I refuse to allow you the satisfaction of butchering my Sunday brunch as well.”
.
The waffles—they aren’t half-bad.
They eat in silence, Blair and Dan, distinctly separate entities who simply happen to be sharing one communal living space. She certainly doesn’t notice the rough timber of his voice or the cleft of his chin and he doesn’t acknowledge the slight moan that escapes her lips when she first tastes the waffles—they’re good, of course they are, no doubt thanks to her divine intervention.
Blair is eating waffles at seven-thirty. Blair is eating waffles in Brooklyn, waffles drenched in maple syrup and loaded with whipped cream, occasionally sneaking glances at her Tortured Artist roommate out of the corner of her eye only to catch him looking right back at her.
And everything is quiet.
And everything is kind.
And somewhere, Blair thinks, an alarm is ringing.
Get out of here while you can. Escape while it’s still safe to do so. Don’t get too comfortable when you know it’s all going to come crashing down around you. Run run run run run run run.
It’s too loud. The voice that’s screaming at her sounds a bit too much like her mother’s. The hands that are pulling her backwards, gripped tight around her forearms, feel a bit too much like Chuck’s. That’s the only reason that she’s able to ignore them; she refuses to give those who have spattered her life with black ink any more validity than they’ve already received. May Charles Bass and Eleanor Waldorf rest in torture, haunted by the knowledge of what Blair Cordelia Waldorf could have been.
Could have been. Should have been. Probably wouldn’t have been eating waffles at seven in the morning with Daniel Humphrey who, for some unknown reason that she doesn’t dare to attempt to deduce, still has yet to put on a shirt.
He’s smiling at her. So bright it’s blinding. Bright enough that she thinks he might mean it.
“You’re not a bad chef, Waldorf.”
“The correct term is pâtissier. And you don’t need to sound so surprised.”
She smiles back. Something is tugging in her chest and it’s strange, Blair thinks, like carrying around a knockoff Birkin except…good. Unnatural. Twisted. Less than a week in Brooklyn and God, the scent of poverty and lack of social decorum has already become comforting, is already warping her mind. She ought to sue Humphrey for emotional damages.
“I don’t think there’s a single thing you could do that wouldn’t surprise me, honestly. That’s not a bad thing,” he says, and that feeling in her chest grows ten times stronger. “It’s good. It’s really good.”
The second (real) thing she learns about Dan Humphrey:
He’s kind.
And it is, she thinks.
Good.
Blair Waldorf, nineteen and middle-class and…okay. Good.
And that’s only the beginning.
.
They get along, as it happens.
They’re similar. Almost frighteningly so. Maybe she’d been wrong—maybe Dan isn’t so much Nate’s foil as he is hers, possessing all of her wit and charm and intellect without the sharpened teeth and nails and tongue. He’s who she could have been, if she’d been lucky enough to grow up in a world that allowed her to be good.
Teenage boys don’t have to be made of venom.
He makes a pot of coffee for her in the mornings and keeps it hot until she wakes up, even though that’s usually hours after him. He does the dishes after she cooks, stacking them in the cupboards with a level of organization nearly disconcerting in its voracity. He cleans the bathroom every Saturday afternoon, whistling while he works, only griping slightly about the makeup stains that dot the countertops.
She mentions off-hand one morning that there’s a Degas showcase at the Met and there’s a pair of tickets on the table that afternoon, the ink still fresh, and she’s not used to it.
Being thought about.
.
“If you could be anywhere,” she asks, feet kicked up on their coffee table (uncouth, unladylike, shameful, utterly reprehensible), “Right now. Anywhere in the world. Where would you be?”
He doesn’t miss a beat.
“Paris. I’ve never been, but that’s where I’d be.”
God, Paris. The word alone elicits a dreamy sigh, a moony grin. “I’d be in Paris right now, if I could afford it.”
“Funny Face,” Dan says—slurs, because he’s drunk and so is she. It’s a Saturday, their last Saturday before classes start, and normally Blair would be at a party. Normally she’d be doing a lot of things other than…this, other than sitting on a torn-up couch four and a half glasses deep into a bottle of wine, smack in the middle of Brooklyn, quoting Audrey Hepburn to Daniel Humphrey. “I got that reference.”
She snorts, the sound ugly. “No way. You don’t know that movie.”
“Ninety percent of the English speaking world knows that movie. You’re so pretentious. Has anyone told you that before?”
“Says the most pretentious poverty-stricken person I’ve ever met. Honestly, Humphrey—”
“Dan. You can say it. It won’t kill you, I promise.”
“Humphrey. Out of the five hundred books on your shelf,” she points to the one lining the wall beside them, the one that’s about the same size as her shoe closet in the Upper East Side had been, “how many of them have you actually read? Cover to cover. And don’t even think about lying to me. I grew up around the disgustingly wealthy; my bullshit detector is exceptionally well-honed.”
Bullshit. A vile word. An un-Blair word. A Brooklyn word. God, less than a handful of weeks and she’s already finding herself turning into one of them.
He screws his face up in concentration, brows furrowed, mouth drawn into a focused sort of scowl, and it’s…cute, maybe, if cute is a word that one would use to describe drunk wannabe-poets with Muppet-esque curls. “Fifty,” he says, “give or take. At least forty. Some of them are just for display.”
Blair can’t help it: she laughs, startled and bright, utterly delighted. It’s a sound she’d never really heard before, not from herself, at least not for a very long time. The fact that Daniel Humphrey had been the one to elicit it is terrifying to say the least.
“Oh my God. I knew it! You’re the most pretentious poor person on the planet!”
He doesn’t laugh, but he presses his lips together in a way that lets her know that he’s trying his hardest not to and that, Blair thinks, is even better.
“I meant to! I just haven’t had time, and—”
“And the only thing more important than reading any work of classic literature is making people think you’ve read it.”
“Exactly. I knew you were clever.” Dan grins, shifts forward, smiles at her in a way which is dangerous because oh, she’s been in Brooklyn for two weeks and she’s already so hard-up that she’s thinking about sleeping with her roommate. Unbelievable. “Your turn, Waldorf.”
Your turn.
Two words. Eight letters.
A frightening number of implications. She’s going to ignore them.
“Elaborate, Humphrey.”
“If you could be anywhere in the world,” he says, “right now. Absolutely anywhere. Where would you be? And don’t think about saying Paris, I’ve already called it.”
She smacks him on the arm, gently, but her hand lingers.
And Blair thinks about it, constants and variables, things that are and aren’t and could (should) never be. Somewhere, in some other universe, Blair Waldorf is wealthy. She’s sitting in a penthouse and her arms are curled around Chuck and she’s happy, maybe, or she’s absolutely fucking miserable. It probably doesn’t matter. It’s probably always going to be somewhere in the middle of both.
Somewhere, Blair Waldorf is in Paris. She’s marrying a prince. She’s sipping champagne at the top of the Eiffel tower, sparkling and moving toward a limitless future. How many of those futures, she wonders, lead her right back here: a couch in Brooklyn. A shitty apartment. Wine that comes from a bag in a box. A roommate.
Constants and variables.
Which one of those futures, she wonders, would she pick?
“I’d be here,” she says, and corrects herself before he can comment, “in New York. I’d always choose New York.”
And again—implications.
Daniel Humphrey, clever as he is, chooses to ignore them.
.
“What’s he like?” Serena asks, over the phone because that’s the only way that they can talk lately, one of them always a little bit distracted, one of them always with one foot out the door. “I’m desperate to meet him. He has to be interesting if you haven’t already murdered him in his sleep.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Blair says, but she only says it to give herself time before she has to properly answer the question.
Dan Humphrey is shorter than Nate. Taller than Chuck.
Skinny.
He has freckles on his shoulders—not that Blair’s been looking—and a tattoo on his hipbone that’s only visible when he reaches up to the highest shelves in their kitchen in order to save her the indignity of having to climb onto the counters to grab a coffee mug.
One time she comes home from a journalism course and finds Dan in the living room reading Poe with oversized glasses slipping down his nose, and then he starts to recite Quoth the Raven to her unironically as she sets to work trying to recover the utter catastrophe that he’s taken it upon himself to create on the stove. He does it in a horrible British accent, and when she reminds him that Poe was from Massachusetts it morphs into an attempt at a Boston accent that has her bent over the sink with laughter, desperately dabbing at the corners of her eyes before the tears cause her mascara to smudge.
Dan has friends, actual friends who aren’t always plotting sabotage or espionage or a combination of the two. Every single night he invites her out with them and sometimes she says no but sometimes she says yes, not because she really wants to but she can tell that he wants her to, that he’s inviting her out with them because he means it.
Blair should probably be more offended by the very existence of Dan Humphrey than she is.
“He’s fine,” she tells Serena, and then pauses. “A total hipster. He’s seen Funny Face.”
They don’t go into much more detail than that.
.
Upper East Side Blair wears pearl necklaces that wrap around her neck two, three times, too-tight dresses and headbands that pinch the sides of her temples. The tension headaches remind her that she’s alive, suffering but victorious, wounded and yet untouched. The enamel on her teeth is burnt raw and her knuckles are scabbed and bruised, she’s hungry literally all of the time but she’s thin and God, she’s fucking gorgeous.
Blair doesn’t live on the Upper East Side anymore.
Blair drinks chardonnay blends out of bottles with screw-caps at eleven fifty-five on a Wednesday at a party on a roof in Williamsburg.
There’s music filtering through the breeze, a mix of nineties R&B that Blair doesn’t really know but doesn’t really mind, swaying a little bit to the music before she catches herself. She doesn’t stop, though. She just corrects herself so that she’s more on-beat. She’s wearing pants—not jeans because she’s not a total heathen, but an off-the-rack pair of high-waisted wide-legged slacks that make her feel like someone else.
The roof is illuminated by fairy lights and lit cigarettes, the occasional flash from camera phones as people pose with their red solo cups in a way that she’s certain is intended to be ironic, draping themselves over the pieces of furniture that seem to have been dragged out of the alley or, somehow more likely, off of a trailer park lawn in Florida.
Dan approaches, dumps more wine into her cup—merlot, she notes, the colours swirling together to create a blush pink that she’s sure looks much nicer than it tastes. She takes a sip of it anyways, unbothered by the cloying sweetness or the way it seems to cling to the back of her throat like juice, or honey.
“Thanks, Dan,” she says, gentler than she’d meant to.
He smiles.
“You look like you belong here,” he tells her, and she pretends she didn’t hear him.
.
Her search history becomes variations on a theme.
How to discourage romantic thoughts about a friend.
Can you go crazy after moving in with a hot boy?
Cross-gender cohabitation problems.
Wanting to sleep with your roommate is a bad idea?
Help, I’ve moved to Brooklyn and have suddenly found myself falling in love with the unwashed lit-nerd hipster who I share a living space with, but he’s also somehow one of my best friends and I don’t want to fuck this up.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
She’d fallen in love with Nate because she felt as though it was the right thing to do. She’d hated Chuck before she loved him, hated him because she loved him, and then after that it was all teeth and hands and hurt. She’s never found herself in the middle of things before they’ve already begun.
She likes Dan. She likes him, and she thinks that she could love him.
.
“I’m just saying—”
“So say less, Humphrey, I’m begging you.”
“I’m only saying that if you’re going to watch a film based off of one of Capote’s works, In Cold Blood is an objectively more interesting story.”
“Oh my God. You really said it.”
“It’s not that Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a bad movie—I mean, as long as you’re ignoring the overt racism and the subtle misogyny—I just mean that it just doesn’t have the same narrative drive. In my opinion.”
She huffs, shoves herself off of the couch, marches to her room and begins tugging clothing from her closet. Pieces are tossed haphazard on the bed with such recklessness that the Blair of the Past would have suffered an aneurysm at the sight (the wrinkles forming in her silk Marchesa gown will never fully disappear), but this is no longer the Blair of the Past and she needs to do something for dramatic effect, something to emphasize just how badly Daniel Humphrey has fucked everything up.
And she can hear him in the doorway, trying desperately not to laugh.
“Blair. What are you doing?”
“Packing,” she snaps, glancing over her shoulder to glare at him with all of the intensity that she can muster. “I refuse to spend any more time living with some backwater Brooklyn heathen who has the audacity to suggest that—”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.” He’s laughing at her. She hates it. “You’re going to be so pissed at yourself when you have to put this all away later.”
“—and let me guess. You’re one of those people who think that they made the right decision dubbing Audrey’s voice in My Fair Lady, aren’t you?”
Dan shrugs, helpless. “Do you want the real answer? Or the one that’ll get you to calm down?”
She throws a sweater in his face.
He steps forward.
She readies another shirt.
“You’re ridiculous,” he tells her. “You’re going to be the death of me.”
“Then do something about it,” she snaps, not even certain herself what she means.
And for all of the times that she’d thought about kissing Dan Humphrey—admittedly, she’d thought about it quite a bit—never once had she thought it would happen like this, with various pieces of designer clothing scattered across the floor all around them and a ballet-pink cashmere Joie cardigan clutched tightly in one hand.
Both of his hands are cupping her face. They’re clutching her like she’s something precious, something delicate, and for the first time in her life Blair feels as though she might actually be. This kiss isn’t a competition. It’s not a fight. She’s nearly twenty now, and when Dan kisses her it’s like he’s pulling all the venom right out of her veins. Maybe she doesn’t have to be angry anymore. Maybe she can be kind.
She doesn’t even realize that she’s crying until Dan pulls away, one thumb brushing against a mascara-smudged drop on her left cheek. He looks horrified, guilty, ashamed, and she knows that it’s because he doesn’t understand.
No one’s ever touched her like that.
“Shit, Blair, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have—You just were scrunching your nose up in this way that you do when you’re angry and it’s so cute, and I just thought…I shouldn’t have, and—fuck, please don’t move out.”
She sniffles, pathetic, blissfully happy.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she says, grinning, raising her hand so that he can see the shirt still clutched in it. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—”
He kisses her again.
(No one’s ever kissed her like that.)
.
Blair Waldorf is (nearly) twenty when she moves out of her bedroom in Dan Humphrey’s apartment and into Dan’s bedroom in their apartment, which is a significantly bigger milestone than it feels as though it should be.
And she’d been right all along.
Brooklyn wasn’t the destination.
(Daniel Humphrey wasn't just a stop along the way.)
.