Ed’s eyebrows rose. “I thought you were done with that.”
“I thought I was too.”
“And?”
I didn’t know how to answer. What was I supposed to say? That she’d apologized—really apologized, without deflecting, without making it a joke? That she’d admitted she was scared, that she’d pushed me away because letting me in felt too dangerous? That she’d asked for another chance and I had no idea what to do with that?
“She’s different,” I said finally. “Or she seems different. I don’t know.”
Ed was quiet for a moment. “You’ve got dinner with Rebecca tonight, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You going to tell her?”
I looked down at the documents on my desk, the evidence of corruption and graft that should have been the most important thing in my life right now. “I don’t know what I’d even say.”
Ed stood, clapping me on the shoulder. “Figure it out. Before someone gets hurt.”
He walked away, leaving me with cold coffee and a pile of work.
The restaurant Rebeccapicked was nice. A new Italian place on Hanover Street, red-checked tablecloths and candles in Chianti bottles, the kind of place that was trying hard to be romantic without being obvious about it.
Rebecca looked beautiful. She always did, but tonight she’d made an effort, wearing a deep green dress that brought out the warm tones in her dark hair, small gold earrings that caught the candlelight when she turned her head. Her camera bag was absent for once, left behind in favor of a small clutch that sat on the table beside her wine glass.
“So I finally got the go-ahead on the Chinatown project,” she was saying, her face animated with the enthusiasm she got when talking about her work.
“Three months of documentation, full access to the community center. I’m thinking black and white, you know? There’s something about the textures there—the signs, the markets, the older generation’s faces—that would get lost in color.”
“That sounds great.” I heard myself say the words, watched myself nod in the right places, but my mind was somewhere else. A different restaurant. A different woman. Green eyes with gold flecks, sayingI woke up.
“I’m hoping to get some of the elders to sit for portraits. There’s this woman, Mrs.Wu, who’s been running the samenoodle shop for forty years. Her hands alone could tell a whole story.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Rebecca stopped. Set down her wine glass. Studied me with the same attention she brought to her photographs, the look that said she was seeing more than you wanted her to see.
“You’re somewhere else tonight.”
I blinked, pulled back to the present by the directness of her tone.
“Sorry. Work stuff. The housing authority story is getting complicated.”
She didn’t push. That was the thing about Rebecca, she never pushed. When I needed space, she gave it. When I didn’t want to talk about something, she let it go. It was restful, being with her. Easy. No drama, no games, no exhausting emotional negotiations.
It was also, I realized as I sat there watching candlelight flicker across her patient face, a little boring.
I hated myself for thinking that. Rebecca was good. She was kind, and she deserved better than a man who was sitting across from her at a nice restaurant thinking about someone else.
The waiter came by, refilled our water glasses, asked if we wanted to hear about the dessert specials. Rebecca smiled and said maybe later, and I watched her handle the interaction with the same easy grace she brought to everything. No friction, no complications, just smooth competence that never demanded anything difficult from anyone.
When had I started finding that unsatisfying?
“Jack.” Rebecca’s voice was gentle. “Whatever’s going on, you can tell me. I’m not going to fall apart.”
I looked at her, really looked, for the first time all evening. She deserved honesty, deserved better than being someone’s safe harbor while they sorted out their feelings for someone else.
“There’s something I need to say,” I started. “And I don’t know how to say it without sounding like an ass.”
