I tell him about my grandmother, who was a court reporter for forty years and who taught me to listen to what people don’t say. That the silence in a room tells you more than the testimony. He listens to this like it’s interesting, because he finds it interesting, and I’m aware somewhere in the back of my mind that I can’t remember the last time I talked about her to someone new.
The grouper fish is, as promised, the right answer.
The wine is good and the evening is warm and somewhere in the second glass the last of my internal legal brief about why this is not a date dissolves quietly into the salt air.
It’s a date.
I know it’s a date.
I’ve known since I put on the earrings.
What I don’t know is what I’m going to do about it.
Cruz tops off my glass without asking, which I should object to and don’t, and leans back in his chair with the ease of a man who is comfortable everywhere, and says, “Tell me something nobody asks you.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
“You get asked about the firm,” he says. “Your daughters. Your cases. The impressive resume of Hannah Caldwell.” He looks at me steadily. “Tell me something that doesn’t make the highlight reel.”
It’s a good question. An uncomfortably good question, from someone who has no right to be asking it this well on what —is allegedly— not a date.
I think about it honestly. “I miss reading for pleasure,” I say finally. “Not for strategy, not research, not because it’s good for my brain. I used to read novels the way other people watch television— compulsively, constantly. I had a book in my hand at every spare moment.” I pause. “I can’t remember the last time I finished one just because I wanted to.”
“Before this trip.”
I nod. “Before this trip.”
He nod in return. “That’s why the deck chair isn’t working.”
“I’m getting there.”
“You’ll get there,” he says, with a certainty that isn’t presumptuous, just — confident in me, which is a different thing. “What else?”
“That was my one.”
“That was a warm-up.”
I look at him across the table in the string lights and the wine-warm evening and I say, because apparently I’ve decided: “I’m lonely sometimes. Not often. I’ve built a good life and Iknow it and I’m grateful for it.” I keep my voice even, matter of fact. “But sometimes I sit in my house at eleven p.m. after a long case and the quiet feels like… too much of nothing. You know?”
He holds that carefully. Doesn’t rush to fill it, doesn’t offer reassurance, doesn’t make it smaller.
“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “I know.”
And the way he says it makes me think he actually does.
We walk back on the beach because the evening makes it obvious and neither of us suggests otherwise.
Shoes off again, waterline, the same comfortable silence we found this afternoon. The lights of the restaurant fade behind us and the beach gets darker and quieter and I’m aware of him beside me with the same stubborn awareness I’ve had since yesterday.
Specific.
Unwanted.
Undeniable.
We’re fifty yards from the walkway when he stops.
I stop.
