“I’ll do the same.” I craned my head toward the counter. “And a slice of apple pie.” Always had to check out the competition.
Besides, we loved pie.
The waitress looked apologetic. “We only have blueberry.”
“Then I’ll take a slice of that.”
She jotted down our orders and disappeared with the menus.
“Blueberry pie?” Kira echoed, raising a brow. “You hate blueberry.”
“I don’t hate them. I’ve grown tolerant,” I said with mock gravitas, earning an eye roll. And Kira loved blueberry.
“Wow.” She giggled. “You’ve changed.”
“Well, if this is the dealbreaker…”
A flash of a smile appeared on Kira’s face before she forced it down again. If the beauty of her smile wasn’t permanently stamped into my mind, it would be like it hadn’t happened at all.
“Speaking of change,” she said. “I’ve started a new resolution.”
“Four months before the new year, too.”
“People can decide to change any day during the year. It’s usually when you put something off that you don’t really want it or you’re afraid to start.”
“So this is something you’re not afraid to start.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I am very afraid. My resolution is to do something every day that scares me. I’m tired of not changing and not growing. It’s like I’ve been living so deep in my routine every day that life happened around me.”
I couldn’t understand how someone as amazing as Kira could look at herself and see someone less. I wondered what role my actions played in influencing her opinions of herself. For one moment, I couldn’t decide whether I hated myself more than I loved her. In the next moment, the answer was obvious.
“I look at you and see a very different woman than the one I last saw in this café. You speak your mind much more frequently, you’re confident, beautiful, selfless. You spend your free time volunteering with kids, Kira. They’re obsessed with you.” I took a sip of my water. “If you want to do scary things, I support you, but don’t let it be because you think you’re not good enough. You’re already more than enough.”
“You haven’t known me in years, Landon.”
“All I want is the chance to re-learn you. I’ll help you withyour goal. It would benefit me to do some scary things as well. As long as it doesn’t involve skydiving.”
She extended a hand across the table to me. “I don’t know what you get out of this, but it’s a deal.”
What she didn’t understand was that I got everything out of this.
After I left Chicago, I told myself I was starting over. A new city at eighteen felt like a clean slate at first. But I had lost more than just a hometown when I moved. I lost Dad. I lost Kira. I lost the diner and the version of myself who still believed in second chances.
Atlanta didn’t make me better. It made me numb.
The first year was a blur of double shifts and takeout containers. I worked like hell to avoid feeling anything at all. And when that didn’t work, I did what the internet told me to: joined a gym, went to happy hours, tried to meet new people.
But eventually, the noise faded and I slipped into a routine. Not because I liked it, but because it was predictable. Safe. And safe was better than sinking.
Still, seeing Kira now—her fire, her determination—it made something flicker in me I thought I’d buried. Maybe I could learn from her.
We shook on it.
“What about you?” she asked, leaning back in the booth and drawing her straw between her fingers.
“What about me?”
“I feel like we’ve talked so much about me,” Kira said, offering a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She toyed with the napkin in her lap, folding and unfolding it like she didn’t know what to do with her hands. “What have you been up to these recent years? Saving more diners?”
