Page 59 of Pretend You Love Me

And I, with complete and total nonchalance, watch him like someone who was not up until midnight mentally replaying a conversation about whether wanting things is actually allowed.

He moves his chair. It’s a small thing… barely a shift… but a woman is coming through the door with a child and Noah moves his chair slightly to the left without looking up from where he’s setting his bag down, without making eye contact with the woman, without doing it for gratitude. She passes through with room to spare. He doesn’t register that he’s done it.

He reads the way he does everything, fully invested, without the half-attention most people give things. His eyes move across the page at a pace that suggests he’s actually in there. When Milo, behind me, achieves a new altitude of noise, a shriek that lands somewhere between triumph and existential protest, Noah glances up from his book, confirms that no emergency is occurring, and goes back to his page.

From the carrier, Maisie cranes her neck toward him with her usual solemn fascination, the way she cranes toward anything she finds worth cataloguing. I adjust her position slightly and get on with things.

The mid-morning stretch arrives the way it always does, the brief lull between the nine o’clock rush and the elevens, when Luca goes into the back to start on the afternoon prep and the café settles into a quite rhythm. Two people at the corner table, one man with headphones working through what looks like a spreadsheet, one regular in the big chair by the window with her usual herbal tea and yesterday’s newspaper. The espresso machine at rest. Milo having apparently exhausted his interest in the board book and moved on to the less complex pleasures of a wooden ring, which he is now mouthing with philosophical focus.

I’m restacking the to-go cups when I become aware that Noah is looking at me.

Not for long. Just a beat, the length of time it takes for someone to notice you’re somewhere else. “You alright?” he asks, and it’s a plain, simple question, no edge to it.

“Yeah,” I start. Then: “Actually.” I set the cups down. “Daniel’s seeing someone. He texted yesterday. I’ve been sort of… turning it over.”

Noah’s face changes immediately. Something apologetic moves across it, the instinct to have not pried. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to…“

“No, it’s fine.” I say it before I know I mean it, and then check whether I do mean it, and find that I actually do. “I think I’m okay. Which sounds… I know that sounds strange.” I look at the counter surface for a second, at my own hands. “I think I’m more okay than I expected.”

The sentence sits there between us, and I’m faintly embarrassed by how surprised I sound, as if being okay is a thing that just happened to me rather than something I’ve been building toward for months.

Noah is quiet for a moment. He sets his book down, just sets it down. “That’s probably because you’ve been surviving this for longer than people realise,” he says. Not to be kind. Not as the thing you say when someone needs comfort. Just because it’s true and he’s noticed.

I go still.

There’s something in that sentence, not the words themselves but the specificity of them, the way they account for all of it, that hits me in a place that I wasn’t ready for. My hands are resting on the counter, and I look at Noah, the way I’ve been carefully not letting myself look, and feel something that isn’t quite readiness but is close to it, a door that isn’t fully open but is no longer locked.

Behind me, Milo attempts to fit the wooden ring around his entire fist with the concentration of someone solving an engineering problem. The regular drops her coins into the tip jar as she passes, the sound familiar and small and entirely ordinary.

“Thank you,” I say, because it’s all I have to give in that moment.

Noah nods. And then, with the same uncomplicated directness he brings to most things, he says, “Would you maybe want to have dinner sometime?”

He doesn’t leave it there as a loaded question. He adds, almost immediately, “You can absolutely say no. Or, not yet, if that’s closer to it. Either is genuinely fine.” He says it like he means it, like the outcome won’t change anything for him, and I understand that this is part of it, that his patience isn’t a strategy but just a part of him.

I look at him for a long moment.

Behind me, the steaming wand has gone quiet. Luca is very, very still.

There is a version of this moment where I say maybe and let it stay there. There is a version where I thank him and find a reason to step away. I am aware of both versions as they flicker past.

“No,” I say. “I think… I’d like that.”

Noah smiles. It’s small and reaches his eyes in the way that things do when they’re genuine. He picks up his book and goes back to his page.

I turn back to the counter.

Luca is facing the coffee machine. His shoulders are shaking. He does not turn around. This is an act of extraordinary restraint, and I acknowledge it internally as such. I pick up the cloth from the counter and wipe something that doesn’t need wiping and look at the middle distance with the focused expression of someone who is completely fine.

An hour later, Noah packs up his bag in the way he always does, quietly, without fuss, tucking his book into the side pocket, standing and pushing his chair back slightly. He raises one hand in the casual half-wave he uses as a goodbye.

I raise mine back.

He pushes through the door and the bell rings overhead and the door swings shut behind him, and for a moment I watch the street through the glass, the ordinary width of a Tuesday morning in Seabrook, people walking with shopping bags, a car pulling into a space, nothing at all remarkable.

Behind me, Milo has found a wooden spoon from somewhere he should not have been able to reach, and he is conducting, or at least, he is doing what he does, holding the spoon aloft and bringing it down against the side of the play mat in a rhythm that has absolutely no discernible time signature but enormous conviction.

I turn back to watch him.