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The server laughs. “You’d have to take that up with the chef.”

After she leaves, Kell picks up his water. “So far, I agree with you about the menu.”

I smile, because the alternative is admitting that I’ve started keeping score in a game Kell doesn’t know he’s playing. The comparison is ridiculous. Knowing that doesn’t stop me.

I ask Kell what he painted today, partly because I want to steer us onto safer ground. He tells me about the smaller canvases he’s been working on, testing how the paint behaves when he thins it, drags it, scrapes one color across another, or abandons brushes completely. He’s started keeping the pieces he likes instead of immediately painting over everything, although his standards seem to change daily.

“Today I made mud with ambition,” he tells me.

That gets a genuine laugh. “Is that an artistic term?”

“It is now.”

“What color is mud with ambition?”

“Brown, but trying very hard not to be.”

The tension I’ve been carrying loosens. This is Kell. This is us. We can sit across from each other in a beautiful restaurant and talk nonsense about paint exactly the way we do at home.

Then the appetizers arrive. Kell reaches automatically for the fork nearest his plate, stops when he sees the three lined up beside it, and turns slightly toward me.

“Which one?”

I indicate the outer fork. “That one.”

He picks it up and starts eating. Nobody around us seems to notice or care.

Dave never had to ask. My appetite disappears. The comparison is unfair, and damn it, I know that.

Bellafonte was easy with Dave. We knew where to park, what wine to order, which dessert was worth saving room for. We had decades of shared history behind every silence.

The problem isn’t that Kell doesn’t know Bellafonte. The problem is that I don’t know what a life with Kell looks like. With Dave, I had years of proof behind every ordinary thing. I knew how we traveled, how we argued, how we spent money, how he behaved when one of us was sick or furious or exhausted. I knew the shape of our life because we’d built it together.

With Kell, I know chemistry. I know laughter and paint on my dining-room floor and sex good enough to make me forget my own name. I know I want him. What I don’t know is what any of this will look like six months from now. Or five years from now.

And if I let myself believe there could be five years, I also have to remember there might not be. I already know what it is to build a life with someone and lose him anyway. Megan didn’t even get warning. Maybe it’s easier to worry about forks and menus than admit how much Kell has started to matter.

Maybe I’ve confused knowing what to expect with knowing something will work.

Kell has been alive a little over three weeks. Turning any of that into evidence against him should make me ashamed enough to stop.

It doesn’t.

Kell asks the server about the painting near the bar because he wants to know whether it’s an original. She doesn’t know, but she takes the question seriously enough to ask someone else. A few minutes later the manager comes to our table and tells Kell it was painted by a local artist whose work has been displayed here for years.

That turns into a conversation about the texture on one section of the canvas. Kell asks how the artist made it stand away from the surface, and the manager admits he has no idea but offers the name of the gallery that represents her. By the time he leaves, he and Kell are both smiling.

Dave would have noticed something was wrong with me by now. The comparison lands before I can stop it, followed immediately by the obvious truth: Dave had twenty-five years of practice. Kell is still learning the different kinds of my quiet.

When the server clears our appetizer plates, Kell studies me before asking, “Do you still like this place?”

The question catches me off guard. “Yes. Why?”

“You seem different here.”

“I’m fine.”

He doesn’t argue. As the server sets down our entrées, Kell leans back and lets the subject drop, which makes me more uncomfortable than an argument would have.