She saw him first, which was something she had always wanted.
He was at a corner table, jacket folded over the back of his chair, looking at his phone with the stillness of someone waiting. Eight years. She stood on the sidewalk and counted them without meaning to. Eight winters she had crossed certain streets without thinking of him, and then thought of him anyway.
She pushed open the door.
He looked up before she reached him, the way he always had — some peripheral awareness of her that had outlasted everything else between them. She watched his face do the thing it did. The small recalibration.
"You're in Portland," he said.
"I'm in Portland," she said.
She sat down without being asked, because they were past asking. The waiter came and she ordered something, wine she thought, though later she wouldn't be certain. He watched her the way he used to: like she was a sentence he'd been mid-way through and had just found the page again.
"I heard you moved back," he said. "Six months ago," she said. He nodded, turned his glass in his hands. "I've been wondering when." "When what?" He looked at her. She knew when what.
The restaurant murmured around them, indifferent. Outside, the streetlights were coming on in that slow way they do in late June, the sky taking its time surrendering to dark. She thought about the apartment they'd had on Morrison. The particular squeak of the third stair. The way she'd once measured the quality of a night by whether he was still there when she woke up.
He had always been there.
His hand rested on the table between them. Not reaching — just present. A question posed the way he'd always posed his questions: sideways, deniable, hers to answer or not.
She put her hand beside his. Not touching. Not yet. The distance between them barely a held breath.
"I'm here until Sunday," she said.