She was on the terrace when he found her, which meant she had been hiding, which meant she had known he would be here.
He didn't say her name. He set a drink beside hers on the rail — gin, without asking, because he still knew — and stood close enough that the warmth of him cut through the December air.
Four years.
"Whoever invited us both," he said, "is either very kind or very cruel."
"One of those," she said.
She didn't look at him. She looked at the street below, at a couple arguing softly outside a cab, at the ordinary December evening that had nothing to do with any of this. His shoulder was four inches from hers. Maybe less. She could feel the particular density of him, the specific gravity she had never managed to assign to anyone else.
"You look—" he started.
"Don't," she said. Not cruel. Just honest.
He nodded. Picked up his glass. Didn't move.
The couple below had stopped arguing. The woman was laughing now, leaning into the man's chest, and something in the ease of it made her throat close.
"I think about you on Tuesdays," he said. "I don't know why Tuesdays."
She did. Tuesdays had been theirs — the slow mornings, the late afternoons, the particular nothing they had made into something. She had never explained that to anyone. She had never needed to.
She turned to look at him. That was the mistake and she made it anyway.
He reached out and adjusted her collar against the cold — one small, considered motion, his fingers just grazing the back of her neck — and she understood that this was the question, and that she had already answered it.