I recalibrate without meaning to. “I didn’t know that.”
“You googled me and it didn’t come up?”
I feel heat climb my neck and I refuse to give it the satisfaction of showing. “The bio said architect.”
“And lifestyle,” he says, “which is the part most people focus on.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he says, and looks back at his sketch, “you’re really not.”
I drink my coffee and decide not to unpack that.
We talk for an hour and a half and I don’t notice until it’s over.
It happens the way conversations sometimes do when you’re not guarding against them. Incrementally, one thread pulling the next, until you look up and the sun has moved and your coffee is cold and you’re in the middle of saying something you hadn’t planned to say to someone you met yesterday over a grill fire.
He asks about me with the specific quality of someone who is actually curious, not performing curiosity. What brought me here, what I do, whether I’ve been to the Outer Banks before. I give him the resume version because it’s what I defaultto. Twenty-four years building the firm, two daughters, the particular satisfaction of winning an argument in a courtroom.
He asks follow-up questions.
Good ones. The kind that requires him to have actually listened to the previous answer, which is rarer than it should be. He asks why family law specifically— not what made me choose law, but whythatcorner of it, and the question catches me enough that I answer honestly instead of efficiently: because when my ex left, I couldn’t find a lawyer who made me feel like anything other than a problem to be managed, and I decided that if I was going to spend my life in a courtroom it was going to be fighting for people in the worst moments of theirs.
He’s quiet for a beat after that. Then: “How long ago?”
“Fourteen years.”
He nods like he’s filing it carefully. Not with pity —I would have ended the conversation immediately— just with the particular attention of someone taking something seriously.
“Your daughters,” he says. “They turned out okay?”
“They’re extraordinary,” I say, and I mean it the way I mean very few things. “Mia’s in grad school. Older one, Cara, just made partner at her firm.” I pause. “She’s thirty.”
I don’t know why I say it. It comes out and I hear it land and Cruz hears it land too. The implicit math, the implicit point. He holds my gaze for a moment with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Good for her,” he says, simply, and looks back at the water.
That’s it. No acknowledgment of the subtext, no reassurance, no awkward redirect. Just —good for her— and the conversation moves on, and I’m left sitting with the strange feeling of having thrown something into the space between us and watched him decline to catch it, not because he missed it but because he chose not to make it a thing.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I excuse myself around nine-thirty because I have nothing I need to do and no reason to leave except that I’ve been sitting here for ninety minutes talking to a thirty-four-year-old man who sketches bad architecture and puts out fires with better wine than I buy for myself, and something in my chest is doing the loosening thing again and I don’t trust it.
“I’m going to go read,” I tell him.
“You’ve been outside for two hours,” he says, “and I don’t think you’ve opened your book once.”
“I’ve been reading,” I say, with the dignity of a woman who has argued cases in front of judges, “internally.”
He laughs, real one, and I take that small victory inside with me before I can let myself enjoy it too much.
Mia calls at eleven.
We talk for forty minutes about her thesis, her roommate situation, a boy she’s not sure about, and the best way to negotiate a lease renewal, because I am a lawyer and my daughters have learned to use this efficiently. I make her lunch recommendations for a neighborhood I’ve never been to and promise to actually read the novel she sent me and tell her I love her three times because she’s my kid and I can.
She asks how the vacation is going.
“Quiet,” I tell her. “Exactly what I needed.”
