Seventeen years after leaving Malcolm Dade, Annelise Rowan asked him to be her date to a wedding.
She had meant to say hello.
That was what she would remember later: the perfectly adequate word available to her, and the extraordinary distance she had traveled to avoid it.
Malcolm stood beside the cafe’s window with a folded newspaper in his hand. He had turned at the sound of her name, called by the woman behind the counter, and recognition had changed his face before she could prepare her own. His beard was new. So were the small lines beside his eyes. Everything else she noticed was too particular to file under either familiar or strange: the breadth of his shoulders beneath a blue shirt, the dark curve of his lower lip, a tiny nick on his left knuckle.
Now he looked at her for another second.
“As your date,” he said, “or your excuse?”
The woman behind the counter put a cup down rather carefully.
Annelise felt heat climb into her cheeks. “That sounded much less peculiar in the brief moment before I said it.”
“Did it?”
“No. There wasn’t a brief moment. I went straight from thinking it to saying it.”
He put the newspaper on the windowsill. She wished he had laughed. She wished, more urgently, that she had not made the first thing she asked of him another unreasonable thing.
“Hello, Malcolm.”
“Hello, Annelise.”
Her name in his voice was worse than the beard. It found a place in her that the preceding seventeen years had apparently failed to furnish.
She moved aside to let a man collect his coffee. The cafe smelled of toasted bread and the sharp, almost green scent of freshly ground beans. Outside, September light lay across the sidewalk. She had lived back in Ashcombe for three months; she had bought laundry detergent, changed her address, found a garage, and believed that returning was a process that could be completed.
“You’re here for Cecily and Hugo?” she asked.
“Hugo told me three.”
“Cecily told me quarter to, which means she wants something carried.”
This time his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but enough to make her want the rest.
“I know Hugo from football,” he said. “We play badly on the same side.”
“Oh.” She had known Hugo had friends. She had somehow failed to imagine that any of them might have once lain awake beside her, laughing into a pillow because her landlord could hear everything through the floor.
“You didn’t know I’d be here.”
“No. Did you?”
He shook his head.
Good. At least Cecily had not arranged this. Her sister was capable of direct intervention, but she usually announced it beforehand so everyone could object and be ignored.
Annelise looked down at the counter. Her coffee stood there with her name written on the lid, a cup she had ordered to go before remembering she was staying. She had been distracted before she even saw him. Their mother had sent a message about a perfectly pleasant man who was newly single and apparently eager to meet her. The phrase perfectly pleasant had acquired the menace of an unpaid bill.
“My mother wants to introduce me to somebody,” she said. “That’s part of why I said it. The wedding thing. But it wasn’t all of why.”
Malcolm watched her without helping.
“I saw you,” she said. “And I wanted—”
She stopped. Across seventeen years, wanting still felt like an inappropriate thing to put between them without first clearing everything else away.
“You don’t have to finish that in a line,” he said.
Relief came so quickly she almost used it to escape. Instead she picked up her cup.
“Could we sit down for a minute?”
He glanced toward the back, where tables had been pushed together beneath a row of mismatched pictures. A small sign said RESERVED. Two empty chairs stood near the front window.
“Until the carrying starts.”
He took the chair opposite hers. The narrow table made a practical distance of the space between them. She pressed the damp napkin beneath her cup with her thumb until it began to tear.
“I shouldn’t have asked that way,” she said.
“No.”
The plainness hurt. She had forgotten that about him, or had remembered it only when it pleased her. At twenty-one she had sometimes called his directness certainty, as if he possessed a quantity she could borrow.
“I don’t want to be the man you bring so your mother stops asking,” he said. “I’m not volunteering for that.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
She looked up. His tone was not cruel; he genuinely wanted to know.
“Yes. It makes you a solution to something that isn’t your problem.”
His fingers rested loosely around his cup. There was no ring. She had looked already, of course. She was ashamed of the speed of that particular assessment, though not enough to wish she had missed it.
“Are you married?” she asked, then closed her eyes briefly. “That ought to have come before the wedding invitation.”
“No.”
“Right.”
“You?”
“Divorced.”
He absorbed that without the small wince people often supplied on her behalf. She liked him for it, then distrusted how readily liking could return.
“We don’t have to do all this now,” he said.
“All what?”
“Seventeen years in twelve minutes.”
Outside, a cyclist walked his bicycle past the window. Malcolm’s attention did not follow it. She had the unsettling pleasure of being the thing he was looking at.
“We could have coffee,” he said.
She glanced at their cups.
“Deliberately,” he added.
Her pulse changed. “You mean another time?”
“Monday. After work, if you work Mondays.”
“I do. Yes. I could.”
“A real coffee. Not an interview for wedding duties.”
She nodded. “A real coffee.”
“And you deal with the perfectly pleasant man yourself.”
“I hadn’t told you he was perfectly pleasant.”
“You didn’t need to.”
There was the smile, brief and recognizable, though the face around it was older. It made her feel both younger and decidedly thirty-eight. She wanted to put her hand on the table nearer his. She kept it on her cup.
The door opened behind her with a rush of voices. Cecily came in carrying a paper bag in each hand, Hugo behind her with a box balanced against his chest. Her sister’s chestnut hair had escaped its clip. She saw them, stopped, and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh. You two have said hello.”
“More or less,” Annelise said.
“Good. Can somebody take this before my fingers come off?”
Malcolm stood and took the box from Hugo. Annelise relieved Cecily of a bag. There was no significant glance, no triumphant matchmaking smile. Cecily was occupied by the urgent problem of whether the cafe had remembered they needed plates.
“I didn’t know you knew Malcolm,” Annelise said as they carried the bags to the back.
“Hugo does. I know him well enough to know he won’t eat the olives, which is useful because I will.”
“I do eat olives,” Malcolm said behind them.
“Then why did you give me yours?”
“You asked for them.”
Cecily considered this. “That explains several things about my friendships.”
Hugo laughed, set down a stack of paper invitations, and took the box back from Malcolm. He asked where it should go. Cecily pointed to a table without looking. He put it on the other one.
“That table’s for food,” he said when she turned.
“Oh. Yes.”
It was a small exchange, unimportant enough that neither of them noticed it. Annelise did. Her sister could be corrected without feeling that love had withdrawn its endorsement. She wished she had learned that earlier.
The afternoon gathering was not officially anything. Cecily had refused to call it a shower, an engagement party, or a planning meeting. It was simply several people who would be at the wedding having food together before they were required to wear uncomfortable shoes. Annelise had approved of the idea until she discovered how many opportunities it contained to be asked about herself.
She helped put out sandwiches. She caught up with an old neighbor whose face she recognized a second before his name became necessary, then was spared because someone called him away. She watched Malcolm talk to Hugo near the window and learned, unwillingly, that she liked the way he listened with his head slightly inclined.
At twenty-one she had known where his attention was without looking. Now she was looking too much.
Cecily nudged her with an elbow. “Is this all right?”
“The sandwiches?”
“My inviting him. I didn’t think to tell you. It was Hugo’s list and mine, and I knew you used to—well. It was ages ago.”
“It is all right.”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything.”
“I know.”
Cecily studied her for a moment. “You don’t look like you know.”
“I was surprised. That’s all.”
It was not all, but her sister deserved an answer she could use while hosting a room full of people. Annelise put a plate in Cecily’s hand. “Eat one before they’re gone.”
Their mother arrived twenty minutes later in a green jacket, holding flowers Cecily had expressly asked her not to bring. Maribel kissed both daughters, admired the arrangements, and began moving the flowers toward a table that had no room for them.
Hugo took them from her. “I’ll find some water.”
“Such a capable man,” Maribel said.
“He can locate a faucet,” Cecily agreed.
Annelise tried not to laugh. Her mother gave her a brief, reproving glance, then caught her by the elbow.
“I heard back about next Friday.”
Annelise knew at once what was coming. She also knew Malcolm was within hearing distance, helping Hugo open a stubborn packet of napkins. She could let the conversation pass into a murmur, agree provisionally, send a message later. Every familiar route was available.
“I’m not meeting him, Mom.”
Maribel blinked. “You haven’t met him yet.”
“That’s true.”
“You might like him.”
“I might. But I haven’t asked you to arrange dates, and I don’t want you to.”
Her mother’s hand slipped from her elbow.
“I was only trying to help.”
“I know. Please tell him there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“I didn’t say it was definitely a date.”
“Then it should be easy to explain.”
That came out sharper than she intended. She took a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to embarrass you. I should have said no properly when you first mentioned it.”
Maribel looked toward the window, then back at her. “Is this because—”
“No. It’s because I don’t want to.”
She resisted the impulse to glance at Malcolm. Whatever he had heard, whatever he might think of it, this refusal had to stand without his assistance.
Her mother pressed her lips together. “All right.”
“Thank you.”
“It doesn’t hurt to meet people.”
“Mom.”
“All right,” Maribel repeated, more firmly, and turned to ask Cecily about the flowers.
Annelise stood still for a moment, feeling oddly conspicuous without anything in her hands. Then she picked up a plate and chose a sandwich she actually wanted.
By five, the tables were covered in empty cups and crumbs. Malcolm had spent much of the afternoon elsewhere in the room. She had not been entitled to resent it and therefore had found it surprisingly easy to resent it in secret. When he came over while she was gathering plates, her body recognized his approach before she looked up.
“Still Monday?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Half past six? Here?”
“Here is good.”
“We should probably exchange numbers that belong to this decade.”
She laughed, and the sound released something tight in her chest. He took out his phone. She read her number to him, corrected the final digit when he repeated it, and watched him send a message.
Her phone lit in her hand.
Malcolm. Monday, 6:30. Coffee.
For an instant she could see the old phone she had once refused to answer: cheap, scratched, lying facedown on the edge of a borrowed bed. Then the present screen brightened beneath her thumb. This was a different device, a different room, a man who had every reason not to make another plan with her and had made one anyway.
She saved his number.
“You don’t have to answer while I’m standing here,” he said.
“I know.”
She typed, Monday. I’m looking forward to it, and pressed send.
His phone sounded. He read the message, and this time she got the whole smile.