“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says, cautious, a little amused.
“Dinner.” I say it simply, the way she seems to appreciate. No performance. No angle. “Not a thing. Just dinner. There’s a place up the road that does good fish and I’ve been eating alone for five days.”
She looks at me for a long moment. I watch her argue with herself. I can actually see it, the consideration and the counter, the yes and the careful no. But I wait without filling the silence because I’ve learned already that Hannah doesn’t need to be talked into things. She needs space to arrive at them herself.
“Let me get my shoes,” she says.
I exhale.
“It’s not a date,” she adds, from inside.
“Absolutely not,” I agree, and smile at her closed door.
7
HANNAH
It’s not a date.
I establish this clearly in my own mind while I’m finding my shoes, which takes longer than it should because I’m not looking for shoes, I’m looking at myself in the bathroom mirror having a very direct internal conversation about expectations and parameters and the importance of not reading into a neighborly dinner invitation from a man who is fourteen years younger and leaving in three weeks and is absolutely not my type even if my type has beenno onefor fourteen years which arguably means I don’t have a type anymore which is not a useful line of thinking right now.
I find my shoes.
I put on the earrings anyway. The good ones, the small gold hoops Cara gave me for my birthday last year. Because I feel like it. Not for any other reason.
The restaurant is exactly right — which I suspect is not an accident.
Not fancy, not trying too hard. A weathered building right on the water with a deck strung with lights and a menu written on a chalkboard and the kind of wine list that’s short enough to mean they’ve actually thought about it. We get a table at the railing with the water below us and the evening sky doing something spectacular overhead and I sit down and think..he picked this on purpose, and then I think….Stop it, Hannah.
“Good choice,” I tell him.
“I’ve been here every summer for six years,” he says, opening his menu. “The grouper is the right answer. Whatever else you’re considering, it’s the grouper.”
“I was going to get the salmon.”
He looks up.
“Too soon?” I ask.
He laughs. A surprised, real laugh that I’m starting to catalog against my will.
And the last of the ambient tension I carried from my apartment dissolves somewhere between the bread basket and the first glass of wine.
Here is the problem with Cruz Jackson over dinner.
He’s fully present in a way I’ve forgotten people can be. Phone face-down on the table, untouched. No scanning the room, no ambient distraction, none of the low-level performance anxiety I’ve noticed in men who are used to being watched. He’s just here, with me, interested in what I’m saying with the specificquality of someone for whom this conversation is the only thing currently happening in the world.
It’s disarming in proportion to how rare it is.
We talk about everything and nothing in the way of good dinners. His sustainable design philosophy, which is more nuanced and more passionate than I was prepared for. The tension between preservation and progress. The way he talks about buildings like they’re living things, like they breathe and adapt and have a relationship with their environment that good design should honor rather than override.
I ask him how he got into it. He tells me about his grandfather. A man who built things with his hands and who taught Cruz that the most important question before you put something into the world is whether it belongs there.
“That’s a good question,” I say.
“He was a good man.” Simple, warm. No performance in it.
