Sundays were for the dog. That was the arrangement, settled months ago over a conference table neither of them had actually needed, and it worked because it asked so little: he rang the bell, she opened the door, the leash changed hands, and that was the whole transaction.
He rang instead of texting from the curb this time. She noticed and didn't say so. The dog got past her ankles before she'd finished the door, going straight for him like the six days between visits were an error he'd corrected.
"You want to take the long way?" he said, watching the dog instead of her. "Around the reservoir. If you've got the hour."
She had told herself, twenty minutes earlier, folding a towel that didn't need folding, that she didn't.
She got her jacket anyway.
The leash was built for one hand and they'd always shared it out of habit, back when sharing it meant something else. Two blocks in, their fingers found the same stretch of nylon without either of them arranging it, the dog straining ahead after a squirrel already gone.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
"What thing."
"Walking slow. You never walk slow."
"I'm not in a hurry," he said, and neither of them corrected which tense that was.
By the water the dog finally tired himself into a trot, giving them the kind of distance that felt, for half a block, like being alone in public — her shoulder finding his without deciding to, his hand not moving from where it already was.
At her door again, the leash passed back the way it always did, except this time he held his end a beat past reasonable, and she let him, and the dog sat down to wait out whatever they were going to call this.