Page 159 of Smoke and Glitter

I don't stand at the window and watch the car disappear. I don't crawl back into bed and turn the morning into a tragedy. I shower, get dressed and go to work with the memory of his hands still warm on my skin.

By lunch, I fucking miss him enough to resent the entire Atlantic Ocean on principle.

The first time Sam calls me from Smoke, he is arguing with the front door.

The video appears sideways, then briefly shows me the pavement before his face fills the screen.

"You're very good at this. It's like video chatting with a seventy-five-year-old man."

"Seriously, Autumn. Okay, hold on." Sam wedges his shoulder against the door while trying to keep hold of the phone, and the picture jerks hard enough to give me an excellent view of one boot and approximately six inches of Chicago sidewalk.

"This is riveting."

"This fucking thing sticks."

"You bought it."

"I bought the building. I didn't personally select the shitty lock."

The door finally gives, and the camera swings into the empty room. Dust sheets cover part of the floor. Tools and material samples are stacked near one wall, and enough has been stripped away that the place looks rougher than when he first showed it to me.

Then a flash of brass catches the light near the future bar.

"Wait. Go back."

Sam stops walking. "What did you see?"

"By the wall. Next to the wood samples."

He turns the phone, and there it is, propped against a box among the tools and construction dust. The brass plate I had fabricated for him.

It looks different, and I realize why once I lean a little closer to the screen.

The space after EST. isn't empty anymore.

"You added the year."

Sam angles the camera toward it, and his thumb brushes across the lower edge of the brass. "Figured it was time."

There are fingerprints across the plate now and a streak of dust near one corner. It's there, inside Smoke, in the middle of the torn-up floor and exposed walls, exactly where it was always supposed to end up.

I smile. "First thing you brought over?"

"First thing."

I look beyond it toward the torn-up floor. "Show me the tile."

Sam turns the camera back toward himself, his mouth already pulling sideways. "Nice to see you too."

"Mmm, your beard looks yummy."

He laughs and turns the phone away from himself.

The original tile is exposed in one section near the back, worn and uneven but still beautiful beneath the construction dust. Sam crouches so I can see it better, then walks me toward the bar wall while explaining what the contractor found when they opened part of it.

He isn't giving me a presentation. He gets distracted halfway through explaining the electrical work because one of the stools he ordered has arrived and immediately decides he hates it. A minute later, I am staring at two slabs of wood while he demands an opinion on the future bar top.

"You've already decided," I tell him.