Page 66 of Fate, Interrupted

He starts toward his truck, then pauses and turns back. “Nice to see you again, Norah.”

“You too.”

He gives Silas a brief look, the compressed communication of brothers who have been reading each other their whole lives. He climbs into his truck and pulls out of the lot.

We watch him go. When I turn back to Silas, he’s watching the truck disappear down the road with the expression of someone doing damage assessment.

“He’s such a nice guy,” I say.

“He’s trouble.”

“He’s lovely.”

“That,” Silas says, picking up the basket and starting toward his truck, “is what makes him trouble.”

He opens the passenger door, I climb in, and he circles around to the driver’s side. The drive back starts in the comfortable silence that good afternoons leave behind—not empty, not requiring anything, only the fullness of a day that happened how it was supposed to.

The city comes back gradually, trees thinning to buildings, the road widening, the afternoon light going golden and horizontal through the windows in the way it goes in July when the days are at their summer peak.

I watch it for a while before I say anything.

“I almost didn’t come today,” I admit.

He glances at me, surprise registering on his face. “Why?”

“Because it seemed like a day that would matter,” I say. “And things that matter make me cautious. It’s a design flaw.”

He’s silent for a moment. “I almost didn’t call.”

I chuckle at his admission. “And now?”

“The picture isn’t clearer,” he says. “But I called anyway.”

I look out the window at the early evening traffic. A man read me Neruda on a lake today and admitted, without quite admitting it, that he has less control over this than he’s been pretending. For the first time in longer than I want to account for, I felt like I belonged exactly where I was.

He pulls up in front of my place, and the engine idles softly.

Windows along the street are lit warmly against the coming dark, the sounds of children wrapping up their play before tumbling into their homes for dinner. It’s ordinary and somehow feels different from this morning.

I turn toward him.

“You understand this probably complicates things,” I say.

“That thought has occurred to me,” he says. “More than once.”

“But you called anyway.”

“We covered that.”

“I’m revisiting it,” I say. “For emphasis.”

The corner of his mouth moves. “Noted.”

I look at him for a moment. His jaw, those green eyes, unreasonably layered in the low light, the stillness that is never emptiness. I think about the words I’ve been letting you think I have more control over this than I do. How he said it honestly. How I sat with it instead of deflecting, and how neither of us mentioned it again because we didn’t need to.

Some things you say once, and they stay said.

I reach out and find his shoulder, warm through his tee shirt, and close the distance. I made the decision that I wanted to kiss him again somewhere in the middle of the lake, while he was reading Spanish poetry, and I stopped pretending I was undecided.