Her tea was there.

He'd arrived at 7:30. Ordered it at 7:45. Watched it steam. Adjusted its position on the table twice, which was excessive, which was something a person did when they were nervous, which he was, because he was about to tell a woman something that would change the shape of everything between them and he didn't have the right words and he wasn't sure the right words existed.

She came in at 8:01. One minute late. The grey scarf. The coat buttoned to the throat. She saw the tea and something moved across her face, not relief, smaller, the micro-adjustment she made when the world did what she expected it to, the face of a woman who had been braced for absence and found presence instead.

She sat down. Wrapped her hands around the cup. Didn't drink. Looked at him.

"You ordered my tea," she said.

"I did."

"Early."

"It's been sitting there for fifteen minutes. It might be cold. I can get..."

"It's perfect." She hadn't tasted it. "It's perfect."

He watched her drink. The way she always drank: both hands, the cup held like something that might be taken. The ring catching the light. The way she closed her eyes for half a second on the first sip, as if the tea was a place she was returning to.

Saoirse brought pancakes. She was getting better at the approach, the flush was still there, a pale pink at the collarbone, but she could now deliver plates and make partial eye contact and leave without walking into furniture, which Fayiz considered a triumph of human development.

They ate. They talked. The diner did its diner things: the jukebox, the clock, Dottie's slow orbit. The breakfast crowd filled the tables and the morning moved the way all their mornings moved, gradually, without hurry, the pace of two people who had learned that time spent in a booth was not time wasted.

At 8:23, she put down her cup.

"Have you decided?"

She said it carefully. The way you placed something fragile on a table. She was looking at her tea, not at him, and he understood why: because looking at him meant seeing his answer before he gave it, and she wasn't ready to see it, the same way he'd stood in the hallway in Queens and hadn't been ready to open the door.

"About Toronto," she added. Unnecessarily. There was nothing else to decide about.

"Yes."

"And?"

"I'm not going."

Her eyes came up. Quickly. Then steadied. She was reading him. He could feel it... the assessment, the weighing, the funeral-home calibration of whether a person was telling the truth or performing it. He held still. He let her look.

"Why not?"

The question was quiet. The quietest thing she'd said all morning. It was also the most dangerous, because the answer was the kind that changed things, the kind that couldn't be taken back, the kind that sat between two people like a grenade and either detonated or didn't, and he didn't know which it would be but he knew he was going to say it anyway because he was tired, he was so tired, of not saying things.

He'd spent two years not saying things. He'd spent a lifetime not saying things, to his father, to Rifa, to the canvas, to the empty studio at 2 a.m. He'd been silent in hallways and on stoops and in buses to Newfoundland, and the silence had kept him alive, technically, but it had also kept him alone, and he was done with alone. He was done with the version of himself that stood outside doors and didn't open them.

He looked at her.

"Because it's Thursday," he said.

She stared at him.

He stared back.

Three words. They sat between them on the table next to the tea and the pancakes and the salt shaker and the sugar bowl with the chip. Three words that meant: I am not going to Toronto because I am here. Because I am in this booth. Because it is Thursday and on Thursdays I sit across from you and drink coffee and watch you pull your toast into strips and listen to you talk about dead people and stir your tea eleven times and twist your ring when you're about to be honest. Because Thursday is the reason I get dressed. Because Thursday is when I reach for the right colour. Because this table, this booth, this woman, this day of the week, this is where I am. This is where I choose to be.

He said none of that. He didn't need to. She was looking at him and he could see her hearing all of it, every word he hadn't said, the way you could hear a painting before you understood it, with your body, not your brain.

Her lips parted. Closed. The ring turned once. Twice.

The jukebox clicked. New song. Something slow. Something with a voice in it that belonged to another decade.

She opened her mouth.

Dottie arrived with the coffee pot.

"Refill," Dottie said. She poured coffee into his cup, tea into the pot beside Mollie's. Moved between them with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had been interrupting moments in this diner for forty-three years and knew exactly what she was doing.

The moment dissolved. Dottie left. The diner reasserted itself: the clatter, the jukebox, the smell of coffee and toast and the particular warmth of a room that had been doing this, quietly, since before either of them arrived.

But Mollie was still looking at him.

And the moment hadn't dissolved. Not really. Not the way water dissolved things, washing them away. It had dissolved the way sugar dissolved in tea: invisibly, completely, changing the composition of everything it touched.

She picked up her cup. Drank. Put it down.

"Okay," she said.

One word. The same word he'd used when she'd said I'm gay, Fayiz. The same word that meant: I heard you. I'm not going to make you explain. I'm going to sit here and drink my tea and we're going to continue being whatever we are, and the thing you just said is going to live between us like a third cup on the table, always there, never discussed, understood.

"Okay," he said back.

She almost smiled. Not the real one. Not the one that lived behind the wall. Something newer. Something he'd never seen. A smile that looked like it was being built from scratch, assembled from materials she hadn't used before.

They ate their breakfast. They talked about Theodore's expanding criminal portfolio, which now included a stolen glove from the bus stop and an ongoing territorial dispute with a Labrador named Captain. They talked about Dottie's apparent decision to switch coffee suppliers, which Mollie described as "a war crime against the regulars." They talked about nothing and everything and the nothing was warm and the everything was careful and underneath all of it, like the ochre that lived under every painting he'd made since November:

Because it's Thursday.

At the door, she wound her scarf. Three loops. Folded twice.

"Tuesday," she said.

"Tuesday."

She turned. Stopped. Turned back.

"Fayiz."

"Yeah."

"It's a good reason."

She said it quickly, the way she always said the important things, getting them out before she could change her mind. Then she was gone. The bell. The cold. The empty doorway that was never empty.

☕︎