“I know.”
“Before the procedure. Not after.”
“I know.”
“Cruz.” Her hand moves slightly at my neck. “I’ll go with you if you want. When you tell them.” A pause. “If that’s not— if that’s too much, I understand, we’ve known each other less than?—”
“Yes,” I say, before she can finish the sentence. “Please.”
She goes quiet.
“Yes,” I say again, because I want to be clear. “I want that. You there. If you’re offering that I want it.”
Her thumb traces once at the base of my skull. It’s small, deliberate, the kind of touch that doesn’t ask for anything back. We sit there in the gold morning with the ocean doing its work and the relief settling into my bones like the best kind of tired.
“Someone has to take this seriously,” she says finally, just slightly dry.
“You’re literally googling my heart right now.”
“I googled your heart twenty minutes ago. Now I’m just sitting here.” A beat. “The surgeon’s outcomes data is excellent, for the record.”
“I know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know, Hannah.”
She stays on the arm of my chair. Her hand stays at my neck. We finish our coffee and watch the water and don’t say anything else for a while and it is, without question, the least alone I have felt since March.
11
HANNAH
The last night sneaks up on me.
That’s the only way to describe it. One moment I have five days left and then I have three and then I’m standing on my deck in the early evening watching the sun do its signature Outer Banks thing over the water, all copper and rose and completely indifferent to the fact that tomorrow I pack my car and drive eleven hours back to my real life, and I feel the deadline of it in my chest like a closing argument I’m not ready to make.
Cruz is beside me at the railing.
We’ve been here for an hour, easy and quiet, the way we’ve learned to be. His sketchbook open, my book face-down, neither of us reading or drawing, both of us just present in the particular way of people who have figured out that the other person’s company is enough without requiring it to be anything else.
I’ve been thinking all day about what I want to say.
I’ve been, characteristically, building the case.
Here is what the evidence supports:
Five days. That’s all this has been. Five days of coffee and beach walks and a dinner that was absolutely a date and a man who kissed me like a question and held me like an answer and told me about his heart with the same directness he brings to everything, no performance, no angle, just Cruz being exactly who he is and trusting me to do something reasonable with it.
Five days is not enough data for a verdict.
Except.
I have been a lawyer for twenty-four years and I know the difference between insufficient evidence and a verdict you’re afraid to reach. I know when I’m asking for more time because I genuinely need it and when I’m asking for more time because I already know what I think and it scares me.
I already know what I think.
“I looked up the drive,” I say.
