Heat—favoyeur hot, as some would later describe it—settled into the day. It was not merely temperature. It lived in the slow burn of sand underfoot, in the way conversations thinned to syllables, in the flaring of colors against the sun. People peeled back layers—jackets, reticence, small talk—and in the shade of the tamarisk, stories surfaced like warmed clams: a divorce settled quietly two months before; an acceptance letter printed at dawn; a childhood memory of the sea swallowed up by time. The favoyeur impulse changed shape. Observation became empathy as each revelation rippled through the group in private waves.
