"You look beautiful."
I smiled. "Thank you."
He held the cosmos out, his thumb against the stems.
"From the back fence."
"I love them."
I took them. Our fingers met on the stems for a beat longer than they needed to.
He waited while I put the flowers in water at the sink. Moose had been brushed and bribed with a peanut-butter Kong and made to understand, in clear English, that no part of this evening involved him. The cat in the crate by the radiator watched me with the yellow eye and the half-shut one. I told him I'd be back.
Easton took my coat out of my hand before I could put it on. He held it open by the shoulders. I turned. He settled it onto me and let his hands rest there for a count of one before he stepped back.
The diner smelled like coffee that had been sitting on the burner since lunch and the particular vinegar of a place that had been making the same French fries for forty years. We took the booth by the window in the back, the one I'd always taken.
Easton slid in across from me.
"You look like you've sat here before."
"I've eaten more meals in this booth than in any room I've ever lived in. Including the brownstone."
"That tracks."
A waitress brought waters and menus we didn't need. Meatloaf for him. Grilled cheese for me, because grilled cheese was what I'd been ordering at this diner since I was old enough to read it off the board. The fries to split.
"I should warn you about something."
"Hit me."
"You and I sitting in a booth together is going to be on the bridge club's agenda by Wednesday."
"Astrid. I'm a firefighter who lives across the street from a recently returned divorcée. The bridge club has been working on me for weeks. They started without you."
"You think you're the most interesting thing in here?"
"I think I just sat down with the prettiest woman in here."
My face went warm before my brain caught up with the line.
He ate his meatloaf like a man coming off a sixteen-hour shift. I ate my grilled cheese in halves and corners and the small triangles I'd been cutting it into since I was seven. We split the fries. He let me take the crispiest ones off the top without commentary.
He told me about a call he'd run on Tuesday between the cat and showing up at my door. A woman with the back gate open and the toddler missing. The toddler had been three doors down at his friend's house. Mendoza found him in a sandbox. The mother cried into Easton's shoulder for ten minutes after they got the kid back, and Easton stood there and let her, because the worst part of getting your kid back was the next ten minutes after, and he wasn't going anywhere until she was through them.
He didn't tell it like a heroic story. He told it like a Tuesday.
I told him about the cat. The bald patch behind one ear, the ear mites, and the eye infection I was treating with ointment. I told him I thought I was going to keep him. I told him no name was getting picked until the cat had been with me long enough to know what kind of cat he was.
"You're a good vet, Astrid."
I shrugged.
"I'm a vet."
"You're a good one."
"How would you know?"
