Nora didn't ask for details. She'd heard almost all of them in her apartment in Wicker Park, and she'd never asked me to retell any of it.
"And he said?"
"He said —" I stopped. The exact line was right there in my mouth, and I wasn't sure I wanted to put it out in the open.
She waited.
"He said he's never had a best friend."
I expected something back, thinking Nora would have some sort of reaction. I watched her face.
She picked up her espresso, drank half of it in one pull, and set the mug down.
"Good," she said.
"Good?"
"Yeah."
"Nora."
"You stayed long enough for it to land. You gave him more than a story." She picked her espresso back up. "That's a good thing, and there's a second thing."
"There's always a second thing."
I pulled the cap off the gin bottle in the well, checked the pour spout, and capped it again.
"Hit me," I said.
"Now you let him decide what he's going to do with it."
"That's not really —"
"That's exactly what it is," she said.
"How?"
"You don't get to manage his response." She went back to her clipboard, pen in hand. "You don't get to call later in the day to make sure he's okay with it. It's not fair to show up at his condo with food if the only reason is to see what he's doing with it. You don't get to text him a photo of a dog at the end of his block to remind him you exist. He gets to decide what he does with it. That's the deal."
"I wasn't going to do any of that."
She looked up. "You were going to do at least two of those by dinner."
I opened my mouth, shut it, and then opened it again. "The dog thing was highly specific."
"I've watched you for two years."
"So, that's it?" I asked. "That's all I get?"
"You came in three hours early for that. I'd say you got your money's worth."
She picked up her clipboard, flipped to the next page, and walked back toward the wells without waiting for a response.
Tomasz came through with the lemons I'd grabbed on the way in. They were piled in the prep bin to my left, cold from the walk-in, the rinds beaded with condensation. I rolled the first one under my palm to break the membranes. I trimmed the ends and sliced into halves, quarters, and eighths. The wedges fell away cleanly.
Nora wasn't wrong about the dog. There was a beagle tied up most weekends outside a cafe on State, in a plaid coat in winter, and it would have made an excellent low-stakes excuse to send a photo.
Pratt's line came back. It had been coming back all morning, in the gaps between everything else.
