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“That isn’t what I said.”

I hold her gaze. “You keep telling me what you’re not saying.”

Laura closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she seems to have made a decision. “We’re very different,” she says.

I wait, but she doesn’t add anything. “I know.”

“You say that like it doesn’t matter.”

I think about all the ways we’re different and all the ways I stopped caring about most of them almost as soon as I understood them. “Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

Laura folds her arms tighter across herself. “It matters to me.”

For a moment, my chest feels strangely empty. I go still. Bellafonte comes back immediately. The menu. The forks. The way she kept shrinking away from me even while insisting nothing was wrong.

“The menu,” I say.

Her mouth tightens.

“And the forks.”

Laura’s shoulders go rigid. “Kell, it wasn’t about forks.”

“You were embarrassed.”

Laura’s expression closes off. The silence stretches just long enough to answer me before she does. “I was uncomfortable.”

I stare at her. “With me.”

She looks away, and that is answer enough. I haven’t wanted to name it since the drive home because naming it makes it harder to pretend I might be wrong.

“You liked that restaurant until you took me there.”

Laura turns back to me. “That’s not fair.”

I have to swallow before I can answer. For a second, I can’t make myself say it. Then I do. “It’s what happened.”

“It was the first time I’d been back since Dave died.” She presses one hand against the edge of the counter. “Of course I was going to have feelings about it.”

“I know. You told me that.”

She wraps her arms around her waist. “Then why are we doing this?”

“Because you’ve been different with me ever since.”

Laura presses her lips together, and I wait. I’m done filling the silence for her. Finally, she says, “I think being there made me see some things I hadn’t wanted to see.”

“What things?”

“That maybe chemistry isn’t the same thing as compatibility.”

I know compatibility. Laura has used the word before, and I understand what she means by it now.

“Because I couldn’t read the menu?”

“No.”

“Because I didn’t know which fork to use?”