“How do you take your coffee?” Claire asked, as though that was the important detail of this conversation.
“Black with one sugar, which is wrong according to everyone, but Jordan never tried to change it.” She paused for a moment. “We talked for forty-five minutes in my car in that parking garage. My assistant texted me three times, and I never answered.”
“Wait, you didn’t answer James?” Nina said, her eyes wide. “Oh, that is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Harper almost smiled, almost. “Anyway, he asked if he could take me to coffee, not dinner, coffee. Because he remembered I don’t like first dates. He said this really wasn’t a first date, it was a reintroduction.”
“A reintroduction,” Claire repeated. “Nice.”
“That’s a good word,” Nina said, shrugging her shoulders.
“No, it’s a terrifying word. Reintroduction means we’re starting over. And starting over means I have to let him see the version of me that exists now, not the version he remembers. And the version that exists now is this fifty-year-old woman who eats toast over her sink and just got a tattoo.”
“Did you say yes?” Nina asked.
“To coffee?”
“To the reintroduction?”
“Oh, I said I’d think about it.”
“Harper!”
“What? I’m a deliberate person. I like to deliberate.”
“You’re a scared person, and you stall. I swear, I’ve never seen anyone go so out of their way to prevent happiness.”
Harper looked at Nina. The directness was new, or maybe old. It was Nina from before when David died, the Nina who would call things out without apology.
“You’re right,” Harper said. “I am stalling.”
“Call him,” Claire said. “Say yes.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You just let a stranger put a permanent mark on your body. You can have coffee with a man who makes rocking chairs.”
Harper looked at her wrist again, thinking about the wave beneath the bandage, the small permanent mark she had made because she was trying to learn that not everything in life could be controlled.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call him tonight.”
“Tonight,” Nina confirmed. “Not tomorrow, not after you’ve had time to overthink it again and convince yourself it’s a bad idea. Tonight.”
“You know, you’re very bossy for someone who sat in parking lots for months.”
“Yeah, well, I’m making up for lost time.”
Harper laughed. She sat on that bench with her best friends, ice cream melting down her fingers, a permanent wave on her wrist, and Savannah folding itself into the evening around them.
She thought about Jordan and his workshop in Mount Pleasant, sawdust on his jeans. And she picked up her phone and texted him.
Yes to coffee. You pick the place.
The response came in under a minute.
Tomorrow. Cafe on Vanderhorst, 9:00. I’ll be the one who looks like he can’t believe his luck.
Harper read it twice.
