She wore the green dress. He recognized it before he recognized her face — or that was how he'd tell it later, which was its own kind of lie.
They had agreed on dinner, nothing more. Two people who had once known each other's sleeping weight, the exact measure of a hand in the small of a back, reduced now to a menu and a candle and the careful table between them.
"You look the same," he said.
She didn't say what she was thinking, which was that he didn't, quite — that time had done something to his jaw, his hands, that she found she preferred.
The waiter came. They ordered wine they wouldn't finish. Across the restaurant, a couple laughed at something private, and neither of them looked over.
"Do you remember—" she started.
"Yes," he said, before she could finish.
That was the thing about him that had never entirely gone away. He still knew which sentences didn't need their endings.
The food arrived. They ate. They talked about things that didn't matter — cities, colleagues, a film they'd both seen separately and remembered differently. The conversation was its own kind of circling, patient and deliberate.
When the check came, he didn't reach for it immediately. Neither did she.
The pause stretched between them, unhurried, the way their pauses always had — not silence exactly, but the held breath before.
"My hotel is around the corner," he said.
She folded her napkin. Looked at him. Remembered every version of that face she had ever known.
"I know," she said.