By six twenty-five on Monday, Annelise had changed her earrings twice and decided this was excessive preparation for a cup of coffee. She left the second pair in. Taking them out would only have made a third decision about the same unimportant thing.
The cafe was quieter than on Saturday. Two students occupied the long table at the back, their books arranged around a single abandoned pastry. Malcolm was not there yet. She was glad for approximately four seconds, after which she began wondering whether he would come.
At six twenty-nine he opened the door.
He wore a charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. There was a pale mark near one cuff, dust or paint, and he looked as if he had come directly from doing something useful. Annelise put her phone facedown on the table before she could check the time again.
“Hello.” He glanced at her empty hands. “Have you ordered?”
“I waited.”
“Thank you.”
They went to the counter together. He asked for ordinary filter coffee; she ordered tea because a second coffee after work would keep her awake, and did not apologize for altering the premise of their meeting. He paid for his drink. She paid for hers. The small transaction felt reassuringly free of significance until she realized she was trying to find significance in its absence.
“Do you want to walk?” he asked. “I’ve been indoors since seven.”
She looked through the window at the soft evening light. “Yes.”
Outside, traffic moved slowly past the shops. They headed toward the older streets where the sidewalk widened and the buildings stood back behind shallow front gardens. He carried his cup in his left hand, leaving the hand nearest hers empty. She noticed that with an intensity entirely disproportionate to the information.
“How was work?” he asked.
“Someone sent me a spreadsheet called Final Final Use This One.”
“Was it the final one?”
“Not even close.”
“What do you do?”
“Payroll. For an office-supply company. Regional, not exciting. People become extremely interested in it when their overtime is wrong.”
“Were you responsible for Final Final?”
“No. I was responsible for making the sender understand why four files with the same title were less helpful than he’d hoped.”
“Sounds diplomatic.”
“I used a very pleasant font.”
He laughed. The sound was lower than she remembered, or perhaps she had remembered him mostly laughing when they were young and breathless and certain of their own wit.
“Do you like it?”
“Mostly. I like getting it right. And I like going home afterward.” She looked at him. “I’m not sure I would have admitted the second part at twenty-one.”
“You were going to have an important briefcase.”
“I did have an important briefcase. It was horrible to carry.”
“Did you keep it?”
“No.”
“Probably for the best.”
They crossed at the lights. His stride shortened a little to match hers, then she lengthened hers, and for several steps they walked in an awkward negotiation neither mentioned.
“Are you still making things?” she asked.
“Cabinets, mostly. Kitchens, fitted shelving. Some commercial work.”
“Your own business?”
“With a partner. Equal partners, which means neither of us gets to blame management convincingly.”
“Do you like it?”
“Mostly,” he said, returning her answer with a glance. “I like when a thing fits. I like when people pay on time.”
“Both highly underrated pleasures.”
“And sometimes I like going home.”
She wanted to ask where home was. Instead she asked whether the work was busy, and he told her about a customer who had measured a room from a photograph and remained convinced the wall ought to be longer. The story was funny because Malcolm did not embroider it much. He gave the customer’s argument the serious delivery it had apparently received, then stopped at exactly the right moment.
Annelise laughed hard enough to spill a little tea onto the lid.
“You can’t fix a wall with confidence,” she said.
“Apparently you can if you invoice the right person.”
They reached a small square behind the library. A few benches faced a patch of grass worn thin at the corners. He gestured toward one and she nodded. Sitting down meant their shoulders were nearer than they had been across the cafe table. It also meant she could no longer let conversation be carried forward by their feet.
“When did you come back?” he asked.
“June. Properly, I mean. I visited before that.”
“Properly?”
“I live here. I have an apartment near the old public pool. A lease, an electricity bill. An unreasonable relationship with the parking outside.”
“So not a visit.”
“No.”
He turned his cup between his hands. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. Or whether I should.”
“You could have sent a message.”
“I didn’t have your number.”
He looked at her, and she felt the insufficiency of that answer before he said anything.
“But I could have found a way,” she added. “Yes.”
She had imagined meeting him in Ashcombe several times. In every version, she had been looking especially well, had had a sensible thing to say, had been permitted to discover his circumstances before exposing her own. None of those rehearsals had included asking him to a wedding before she knew whether he was married.
“You said you were divorced.”
“Two years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was the right decision. That doesn’t mean it was enjoyable.”
“No.”
“We were married nine years. There aren’t children.” She took a breath. “People usually wonder that next.”
“I was going to ask if you wanted to talk about it.”
The difference made her smile a little. “Not in detail. We were good at making arrangements. Less good at noticing when the arrangements were all we had left. It wasn’t one dramatic thing.”
He nodded. She appreciated that he did not ask whether she had been happy, a question so enormous she could only ever answer it inaccurately.
“What about you?” she asked. “You said you weren’t married.”
“Never have been. No children.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“No. I wouldn’t be here like this if I were.”
“Like this?”
He looked at her then, properly, and she felt her fingers tighten around the paper cup.
“Deliberately,” he said.
She could have kissed him for that word, which was inconvenient because there was something she needed to say first and had needed to say for seventeen years.
“Malcolm.”
He waited.
“I’m sorry I ended things with a phone call. Such a short one. And I’m sorry I didn’t answer when you called me afterward.”
The square continued around them. A bus stopped beyond the railings; she heard the hiss of its doors. Malcolm kept his eyes on hers, and she had the absurd urge to make the apology longer so the silence would have somewhere to go.
“You deserved a conversation,” she said. “More than one. I knew that even then.”
“Yes,” he said.
Her chest tightened.
“I don’t expect you to say it was all right.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t sound upset on the phone.”
“I was trying very hard not to.”
“I could hear that you wanted to finish.”
She looked down at her hands. The lid of her tea had a small brown stain on its rim. She had been worried a moment ago about getting it on her pants. It seemed extraordinary that she could have been worried about that.
“I did,” she said. “I wanted it finished because I couldn’t stand hearing what it was doing to you.”
“That’s a difficult thing to hear.”
“Yes.” She made herself look back at him. “It was a cowardly thing to do.”
He leaned against the bench, looking across the square. His face gave her no quick route to relief.
“Why did you leave like that?”
The question was immediate. So, she decided, the answer had to be.
“I wanted the training. I wanted to live somewhere else. Both of those things were true. And I was frightened that if we tried to stay together and I hated it, or liked it too much, or changed my mind about anything, I’d be responsible for making you unhappy every week.”
“I said we could try weekends.”
“I know.”
“It was Richmond, Annelise. Not another continent.”
“I know that too.”
The ninety minutes between cities had seemed, then, like the smallest part of the distance. She had been ashamed of her uncertainty because Malcolm had sounded so willing. She had mistaken his willingness for a demand that she become certain too.
“I didn’t know if I wanted us to last,” she said. “That was the part I didn’t want to say. I thought it would be worse than ending it quickly. I think I wanted to leave without seeing myself as someone who could hurt you.”
“And that worked?”
“No.”
His mouth tightened, not quite anger and not quite the absence of it.
“I’d have preferred the ugly conversation.”
“Yes.”
She did not tell him she had cried after reaching Richmond, in a rented room with boxes unopened around her. Those tears came days after the call, and were not evidence he needed to weigh against what she had done.
For a while they sat without speaking. She let him have the silence, though her whole body wanted to offer him something: explanation, coffee, an easier version of herself.
Finally he said, “Thank you for saying it.”
She nodded once. It was less than forgiveness and more than she had been owed.
“Do you want to head back?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
The words went through her with a sudden, quiet force.
He stood and took her empty cup when she offered it toward the nearby bin. The lid caught on the rim; he pushed it down with one finger, frowned at the inadequacy of the opening, and came back. Such an ordinary action. She had been braced for him to leave, and here he was irritated by municipal design.
They walked on through the square.
“Tell me something about being back that isn’t parking,” he said.
She thought. “I keep going into shops that aren’t the shops I remember.”
“The pharmacy that sells lamps?”
“Yes. I went in for toothpaste.”
“How was the lamp?”
“Terrible at cleaning teeth.”
He laughed, and she felt the temptation to seize the laugh as proof that the difficult part was finished. It wasn’t. They were simply also capable of laughing.
She told him about her apartment, its bright kitchen and its bedroom door that would not stay open unless she wedged a shoe beneath it. He told her he had bought a small house several years ago and had spent the first winter discovering which repairs the previous owner had described optimistically. His place was about twenty minutes from hers. Neither distance required a reinvention of their lives.
“Do you see your sister often?” he asked.
“I’m trying to.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“She was fifteen when I left. I think I keep expecting to find the person who wanted me to buy her things she wasn’t allowed to have.”
“And instead?”
“She has opinions about table plans. Very strong ones.”
“She always had opinions.”
“That’s true.”
He knew a version of Cecily too. She had forgotten that history could belong to more people than the two who had made the most dramatic mistakes in it.
At the corner near the cafe, they stopped beneath a tree whose leaves had begun to yellow at the edges. She could see her hatchback halfway down the street. She had expected the evening to last an hour; it had lasted nearly two, and she did not know what part of it she wanted to keep touching first.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“You asked me to a wedding. I negotiated down.”
She smiled. “Very sensible.”
“I don’t know about sensible.”
His gaze moved over her face, briefly resting on her mouth. It was not a kiss, but her body received it with an optimism she could not reason away.
“Would you like to walk again on Saturday?” he asked. “The covered market’s open. We could go through there.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t given you a time.”
“I can manage the suspense.”
“Eleven?”
“Eleven is good.”
He put his hands into his pockets. “All right.”
She wanted to say something graceful about second chances. She wanted to tell him she would not waste this. Instead she said, “I’ll see you Saturday,” and let the promise be exactly that size.
At her car, she turned once. He was still at the corner, checking the road before crossing. Then he looked back, lifted a hand, and went on into his evening.