“Met any interesting neighbors?”
There’s a pause that I manufacture specifically to be the length of a normal pause and not the length of a pause that means something.
“No one remarkable,” I say.
After we hang up I go back to the deck and find, positioned precisely beside my Adirondack chair, a second Adirondack chair that was not there this morning.
Cruz’s deck is empty. He didn’t say a word about it.
I sit down in my chair and look at the one beside it for a long moment.
Then I look at the ocean.
Then I open my book and, this time, actually read it.
4
CRUZ
I put the chair there and go inside before I can second-guess it.
Not a grand gesture. Not a statement. Just that she’s here for a month and her deck only has one chair and that seems like an oversight I can quietly correct without making it weird. That’s the whole logic. I’m not building a narrative around a chair.
I’m absolutely building a narrative around a chair.
I make eggs I actually cook correctly this time —no audience, no camera, no intentional chaos— and eat standing at my kitchen counter looking out at the shared railing and thinking about the way she saidfourteen yearslike she was handing me a test.
I know what she was doing. She’s a lawyer; she builds arguments. She was laying out the case against whatever this is before it has a chance to become anything, preemptively closing a door she hasn’t decided whether to open.
The age gap.
The life-stage gap.
The daughters-older-than-me gap.
I heard all of it under the surface of those two words.
Here’s what she doesn’t know: I’m not arguing the case. I’m not going to show up with a counter-brief and a list of reasons why the math doesn’t matter. That’s not how this works and even if it were, Hannah Caldwell would see through it in about four seconds and I’d lose whatever ground I’m standing on.
What I’m going to do is be exactly who I am and let her figure out that I’m not a punchline.
That’s the whole plan.
I call my sister at noon because she has radar for when something is happening with me and if I don’t call her first she’ll call me at the worst possible moment with the worst possible timing and ask questions in that specific Maya way that makes me feel seventeen.
She picks up on the second ring. “You posted a grill fire video.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“The neighbor who saved you,” she says. “Tell me about her.”
I pause half a second too long.
“Cruz!”
“I just met her.”
“You paused.”
