They sat there for an hour. Mollie didn't know when the hour happened. She'd been planning to stay twenty minutes, just long enough to confirm he wasn't dangerous, that he had a face that matched a human being and hands that stayed on his own side of the table, and then she'd been going to leave and go to work and organize someone's death, which was what she did, which was what she was good at, which was the only thing she was good at, and she needed to stop thinking about that.

But the hour happened anyway.

They talked about the diner. About Duckworth Street. About how November in St. John's was a personal assault on the human spirit and how the fog didn't roll in so much as sit down and make itself at home and how neither of them owned enough warm clothing and both of them had arrived from warmer places and both of them were, in their own ways, profoundly unprepared for the cold.

He told her about Theodore. She told him about a plant on her windowsill she'd bought three weeks ago from a sad-looking display outside a pharmacy.

"Have you named it?" Fayiz asked.

She looked at her tea. Turned the cup a quarter-turn. "No. Naming things is how you get attached."

He looked at her. His dark eyes, dark enough that she couldn't tell where the iris ended and the pupil began, held her for a beat too long, and she could feel him seeing something, filing it away, the way she filed away the details of the families who came through the funeral home. Mental notes. Observations she wasn't supposed to make.

He didn't comment on it. He ate another triangle of pancake.

She didn't comment on the fact that he cut his pancakes into perfect triangles, like he was following some internal geometry, some careful system that turned eating into something that looked like meditation. She filed that away, too.

At 9:03, she said: "I have to go to work."

"The funeral home."

"You remembered."

"It's memorable."

"I answer the phone with Smith and Sons Funeral Home, Mollie speaking, how can I help you. Which is a question I try very hard not to think about."

He almost laughed. She could see it, the way his chest moved, the way his lips pressed together, and she was annoyed at herself for noticing and annoyed at him for being the kind of person whose almost, laugh was visible, which was a stupid thing to be annoyed about, so she stopped.

"So," she said. "Are we doing this?"

"The breakfast thing."

"The breakfast thing. The..." She waved her hand in a circle that encompassed the booth, the diner, the jukebox, the fog outside, the entire arrangement. "The contract."

"We should probably write it down," he said. "If we're going to be serious about it."

"I'm always serious. Ask anyone."

"I don't know anyone to ask."

"Exactly," she said. "That's the whole problem."

He pulled a napkin from the dispenser. Reached into his jacket, inside pocket, and pulled out a pen. Of course he carried a pen. He was a painter. Painters probably carried pens the way she carried tea bags, which she did, in her coat pocket, two PG Tips at all times, because she was a person who planned for emergencies and the only emergencies she could handle were the ones that required hot water and milk.

He flattened the napkin on the table. Wrote, in a hand that was surprisingly neat for someone whose fingers looked like they'd been in a fight with a paint set:

THE AGREEMENT

1. Term: One calendar year.

End date: April 1.

He looked up. Counted something she couldn't see. "That's five months."

"Yes."

"Your post said one year."

"Plans change. Write it down."

"What's the schedule?"

"Breakfast," she said. "Twice a week. Tuesday and Thursday."

"Why Tuesday and Thursday?"

"Because Monday is already miserable and Wednesday is too far from anything and Friday I work late and weekends..." She stopped. Weekends were long. Weekends were the part she couldn't talk about. "Tuesday and Thursday."

He wrote it down. 2. Breakfast, every Tuesday and Thursday, 8 a.m.

"What are the rules?" he asked.

"No romance."

He blinked.

"I'm serious," she said, and she was, she was deadly serious. "No romance. Not even an idea of it. No fixing each other. No asking are you okay unless you actually want the answer, because the answer is no and it has been no for a very long time and I don't have the energy to lie about it."

He wrote. His pen moved in quick, short strokes. She watched his hand and saw the paint in the grooves of his knuckles shift as his fingers flexed. Ochre, mostly. A slash of blue near his thumbnail. She wondered what painting had put it there. She wondered if it was any good. She wondered why she cared.

"Conversation," he said. "What's allowed?"

"Everything. The good, the bad, the embarrassing, the stuff that would make a therapist take notes. If you say it at the breakfast table, it doesn't leave the breakfast table."

He looked at her. "You've thought about this."

"I've had time."

He nodded. Wrote. Didn't push.

She liked that he didn't push.

He added the last clause himself. She watched him write it and her throat did something she didn't give it permission to do.

5. On April 1, we go together.

Location TBD. Method TBD.

The only requirement:

Neither of us dies alone.

She read it three times. The napkin was already wrinkling under his pen, cheap paper doing cheap paper things, and the ink was uneven in places where the grain fought back. It looked like what it was: two desperate people making a deal in a diner at nine in the morning while Hall & Oates played on a jukebox that had no business being that loud.

It was the most serious document she'd ever read. And she read death certificates for a living.

He held out the pen.

She took it. Signed at the bottom: Mollie Elizabeth Bates. Full name, because this felt like a full-name situation, because Charlie used to say if you're going to do something stupid, Molls, at least commit to it properly.

Fayiz signed under hers. Fayiz Marakkar. Clean. Decisive. Like a man signing a lease, which, in a way, he was. A lease on the next five months. A lease on her Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings. A lease on whatever this was going to be.

Then, in tiny letters at the bottom, he added a postscript:

P.S. Theodore says if we do this at his studio, we have to promise not to do it on his bed. It's his favourite.

She read the postscript. Read it again.

Something happened in her chest. It wasn't a big feeling. It was the smallest possible feeling, the structural equivalent of a house settling, something deep and quiet shifting an inch in a direction she hadn't planned for, and she squashed it immediately because she was a professional and professionals did not have feelings in diners at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday.

But the postscript stayed with her. The tiny handwriting. The dog who had a favourite bed. The man who, in the middle of writing a contract about dying, had thought to include a joke about his dog's furniture preferences.

She picked up her tea. Put it down. Picked it up again.

"Your dog has a favourite bed?"

"My dog has a favourite everything. Favourite cushion. Favourite corner. Favourite sock, which he stole from me and I've accepted I'm never getting back." He said this very seriously, like he was delivering a medical diagnosis. "In Kerala we have a saying. The dog owns the house. You just pay rent."

"Is that a real saying?"

"It is now."

Mollie pressed her lips together. Looked left. Looked at the napkin. Looked at the man across from her who had paint on his hands and syrup on his chin and had just made a joke about his dog in the middle of a suicide pact.

"Right," she said. "Well. Thursday, then."

"Thursday."

She stood up. Put on her coat. Pulled her bag over her shoulder. He stood too, which she wasn't expecting, and the full height of him hit her all at once, she came up to his shoulder, barely, and she had to tilt her head back to see his face, and he had to look down to see hers, and there was a second where they were both just standing there in the narrow space between the booth and the aisle with a signed napkin on the table between them and Hall & Oates dying a slow death on the jukebox.

He held out his hand.

She took it.

His hand was warm. Hers was freezing, the way it always was, the way it had been since she was a kid, since Charlie used to grab her fingers and say Molls, you're a corpse, I'm buying you gloves for Christmas, and the thought came and went and she let it come and go because that was what she did now, she let the Charlie thoughts come and go, like weather, like the fog outside the diner window, like something she couldn't stop and had stopped trying to.

Fayiz's hand was warm and his grip was firm and she could feel the ridge of dried paint on his index finger and the callous on his palm where he held a brush. He held on for exactly the right amount of time. Then a half-second longer. Then let go.

She didn't mention it.

She left.

The cold hit her on Duckworth Street like a slap and she pulled her coat tighter and put her earbuds in and pressed play on whatever was already queued up and Laura Marling's voice came through, soft and sad and knowing, singing something about being alone on purpose, and Mollie walked three blocks to the funeral home with her hands in her pockets and the napkin's handwriting still visible behind her eyes.

She could still feel his hand.

She could still feel the paint.

• • •

Fayiz sat back down in the booth. Dottie came by and refilled his water and said "She seems nice" and he said "We're planning to die together" and Dottie said "Sure, love. More coffee?" like he'd said something about the weather.

He picked up the napkin. Folded it once. Put it in his jacket pocket. Then took it out. Unfolded it. Read it again.

Mollie Elizabeth Bates.

She'd used her full name. Three names, signed with a pen that wasn't hers, on a napkin in a diner that served terrible pancakes. She'd been early. She'd been wearing a black coat like she was already at a funeral. She'd stirred tea that didn't need stirring. She'd looked at him like she was deciding whether to trust him or run, and the fact that she'd stayed-

He folded the napkin again. Put it back.

Thursday. He had Thursday.

He paid the bill, his and hers, because she'd left without paying and he didn't think she'd noticed and he wasn't going to mention it, and he zipped his jacket and walked out into the cold. The fog was thick enough to erase the harbour. The coloured houses on the hill looked like paintings bleeding through wet paper. Somewhere in his pocket, his phone buzzed. He ignored it. Somewhere in his studio, Theodore was probably eating something he shouldn't.

Fayiz walked home along Water Street with his hands in his pockets and the napkin against his chest and the cold doing its thing to his face, and he thought about warm colours. Ochre. Burnt sienna. The colour of strong tea.

He thought about her hands. How cold they'd been. How she'd held on.

When he got to the studio, Theodore was asleep on the one good cushion. Fayiz hung his jacket by the door. Put the napkin on the table, under a jar of brushes so it wouldn't blow away. Fayiz stood in front of the grey canvas on the easel.

He didn't paint. He stood there for a long time, looking at the grey wash, thinking about a woman who worked with the dead and drank tea she'd already over-stirred and had hands like ice and a voice like home.

Behind him, Theodore snored.

The harbour fog pressed against the windows.

One hundred and forty-five days.

☕︎