She hadn't deleted his number. She'd just renamed it — something neutral, something forgettable — as though the phone wouldn't know.
Quarter past eleven. His hour, always. She picked up before she'd decided to.
"Hey." Just that. But his voice was the same in a way her memory had gotten wrong — deeper, somehow, than she'd been carrying it all this time.
She said his name the way you say a thing you thought you'd set down for good.
The pause that followed held the shape of three years.
"I'm in the city," he said. "Not for anything. Just — I'm here."
She stood at her kitchen window, looking at the street below. The specific amber of the streetlights. The way a city absorbs its own noise after midnight.
"How long?" she asked. "I leave tomorrow afternoon," he said.
She should have said something practical. Something that would have let them both off clean. Instead she heard herself say, "I'm awake."
The cab took eleven minutes. She counted.
When she opened the door, he looked the same and entirely different — the way time does that, rearranging what you loved without removing it. She was still holding the doorknob.
"You look good," he said. It wasn't what she'd expected. She wasn't sure what she'd expected — an apology, maybe, or an explanation — something that would have made this easier to resist. "You too," she said. And then the door opened wider, the way it had always been going to.