I stood at the server station with my check presenter and my pen and felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was in the right place.
Like the distance from Caton's Chapel meant something.
Like maybe it wasn't just geography.
I watched the door.
I didn't mean to make it a thing. I told myself it wasn't a thing—it was just the natural habit of a server, tracking arrivals,reading sections, anticipating covers. Completely professional. Completely ordinary.
Except that every time the front door swung open, I felt my eyes go there before I'd decided to look, and every time the figure in the doorway was not tall and broad-shouldered with close-cropped dark blonde hair and creek-water eyes, something in my chest did a small, quiet reset that I refused to call disappointment.
Seven o'clock became eight.
Eight became nine.
The reservation sheet emptied out by degrees. The candles burned lower. The kitchen wound down and the sounds behind the pass-through shifted from the urgent percussion of full service to the slower rhythms of breakdown and cleanup. Tables cleared and didn't refill.
He didn't come.
I told myself it was fine. I told myself I'd known him for approximately one afternoon and he owed me nothing and I had built something in my head out of two donuts and a kiss, and that was a me problem, not a Tommy problem. I told myself that men who saidI'd like to see you againsometimes meant it in the immediate tense and sometimes meant it in the general sense and the only thing worse than not knowing which was letting your face show that you cared about the difference.
I kept my face where I needed it.
I counted my tips in the parking lot and they were good—better than average, the tail end of the goodwill from the afternoon following me into the evening—and I tucked the bills into my inner pocket and started the walk home and told myself I was fine.
I was mostly fine.
The ninety-four dollars was almost certainly going to be okay by the end of the week. Luis was putting me on the schedule.A podcast producer had left her card. The world was, by any reasonable accounting, going in the right direction.
I just?—
I had thought about the Battery all through service. The free walk. The harbor at dusk. The way I'd imagined him standing beside me at the seawall, looking at the water straight and honest. I had let myself think about it more than I should have, which was the problem with letting yourself think about things—once the door opened, it didn't close back all the way.
I turned onto my street.
I was composing the reasonable internal monologue—the one about feet on the ground and more information and Dolly going, anyway, without knowing how it turned out—when I saw the light in the apartment window.
That was normal. Tasha stayed up late. Devon was probably back from wherever he'd gone after his work shift. The light was nothing.
Then, I heard the music.
I stopped on the sidewalk.
It was coming from the third floor—my floor—and it was a guitar, and whoever was playing it was good in the way that stopped you on a sidewalk at night without your permission. Not performing. Just playing, the way people played when they'd forgotten the room, or when the room was small enough that forgetting it was easy. A melody I didn't recognize, something original, low and unhurried and with a kind of ache in it that reached down through three floors of an old Charleston building and found me on the pavement.
I stood there for five full seconds.
Then, I went up.
The door was unlocked.
Inside, Tasha was on the sofa with her chai and the expression of a woman sitting in the middle of something shehad very much helped arrange and was not going to apologize for. Devon was in the armchair with a beer and his feet up, looking at ease in the way of a person who had decided this was good television. Geoff was at the kitchen table with his book, but the book was closed, which told me everything.
And Tommy was on the floor.
On the floor, back against the sofa, my guitar—my Gibson, my J-45, the one real thing I owned—in his lap, playing the thing I'd heard from the street like the guitar had been his for years and was just now remembering it.
He looked up when I came in.
