PART 15:

He thought about Kora saying, “You make the same face as when the coffee is really good.” He thought about how frightened he was right now in this moment. And how the fear was not a reason. He turned on the bench to face her fully. I know, he said. I am too. She exhaled. not relief. Let something more complicated.

The exhale of someone who has jumped and is still in the air and doesn’t know exactly how the landing will go, but has decided that not jumping would have been worse. Okay, she said. Okay, we’re not going to be stupid about this, she said. No, we’re going to be careful and deliberate. And Victoria, what I know, he said we will be.

He held her gaze. But we don’t have to figure out the whole thing on a park bench on a Sunday morning. She almost smiled. No, I suppose we don’t. They sat there a while longer. Then they walked back to the subway side by side, not holding hands that would come with the deliberateness she needed, but close enough that their shoulders touched when the path narrowed, and neither of them moved apart. The first date was a disaster.

Not catastrophically. No one spilled anything. Nothing caught fire. No ex-boyfriends materialized from the surrounding air. It was a quieter kind of disaster, the kind that happens when two people who have been genuinely comfortable with each other in one context suddenly find themselves in a different context and cannot locate the ease they’d built.

It was Ethan’s idea, which meant it was also his fault, which he accepted. He’d suggested dinner, a restaurant in the West Village he’d been to once with a client, the kind of place that was good without being performative about it. Exposed brick, good lighting, a menu that didn’t require translation. He’d booked it for a Thursday because Thursday felt like the right balance of deliberate and low pressure.

And he told Victoria the address and time, and she’d said, “Okay, that works.” with the care of someone not wanting to make it bigger than it was while clearly aware that it was. The problem was they both knew it was a date. The knowing of it changed the air pressure somehow. They got there at 7:15 and were seated across from each other and then spent the first 20 minutes being very polite in a way they had never been in the apartment.

She looked at the menu for too long. He asked about a wine he didn’t particularly care about. They talked about her week with the clipped pleasantness of strangers, which was so far from what they actually were that it started to feel almost comic. It was the bread that broke it. The bread arrived in a basket, good bread, the kind with a crisp exterior, and Victoria reached for a piece and then immediately dropped it because it was hotter than she expected, and said a word she almost never said in anything above a murmur, quite

distinctly, across the table, and the couple at the next table glanced over. Ethan started laughing. He tried not to. He failed completely. She looked at him with an expression that was trying to be mortified and losing to something else. That’s He pressed his hand over his mouth.

That’s the first real thing either of us has said in 20 minutes. She looked at the bread, then at him. Then she started laughing, too. Like the real laugh, short and genuine. And the air pressure in the evening changed completely. “I was being weird,” she said. We were both being weird. I kept thinking about how I was sitting, she said. I never think about how I sit.

I ordered wine I don’t even like. Why? Because it felt like the kind of thing you order on a date. She shook her head. We have been sitting in the same living room having better conversations than this for 4 months. I know, he said. I don’t know what happened. The restaurant happened. The occasion happened.

She picked up the bread again, more carefully. We put a frame on it and then tried to perform inside the frame. He considered that she was right. That was exactly what had happened. The same thing that had almost undone the party. The same instinct to manage an impression had gotten into this, too. No more performing, he said. None.

Tell me something you actually want to talk about. She thought about it, genuinely not reaching for the correct answer. I’ve been thinking about whether to buy the apartment. He blinked. Our apartment? The landlord reached out 2 weeks ago. He’s getting older. He wants to sell the building eventually. He’s giving first option to tenants.

She tore a piece off the bread. It’s not a small number. It’s not a small apartment. No. She looked at the bread. I keep going back and forth. Financially, it makes sense. I’ve run the numbers, but it’s it’s committing to a place, he said. Yes, she looked up. I’ve always thought of the city as the plan, not any specific address in it.

Buying somewhere means staying. Staying, she agreed. A pause. What would you do if you were me? He thought about it honestly. I’d buy it, he said. But I think you already know you’re going to buy it. I think you’re asking because you want someone to confirm that staying somewhere is a reasonable thing to want. She held his gaze across the table.

Is it? Yeah, he said. It is. She nodded slowly. Then she ate the bread and they ordered food they actually wanted. And the evening found its footing, the real one. And by the time the check came, they’d talked for two hours without once thinking about how they were sitting. walking home, the city doing its nighttime thing around them, the restaurant still lit up, the sidewalks busy with the particular weekend energy of people who’ decided the week was done.

She reached over and took his hand. Casual, deliberate, hers. He held it and they walked home and neither of them made it into a thing, which was how it needed to be. The conversation with Catherine happened on a Saturday in November, 3 weeks after the park bench. Victoria drove up to Connecticut alone. Ethan offered to come.

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