𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒆𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏

Three weeks and two days after.

𝐅 𝐀 𝐘 𝚰 𝐙

Thursday. 7:45. Theodore at the door.

The routine. The ritual. The dog who sat by the door because the door was where she came from and the door was therefore the most important surface in the apartment. Fayiz put on his coat. Picked up the lead. Theodore's tail moved. Not the full wag, the full wag had been gone for two weeks, but a half wag, a quarter wag, the measured enthusiasm of a dog who was managing his expectations.

They walked to the diner. The usual route. The usual lampposts. The city was different now, late April, the snow gone, the ice gone, the air carrying something that wasn't warm yet but was trying. The jellybean houses looked brighter without the snow. The harbour was blue instead of grey. The world was doing the thing it did every spring: continuing. Regardless.

The diner. The door. The bell.

He ordered two cups. Sat in the booth. His side. Her tea on her side.

He opened the sketchbook, Saoirse's sketchbook, the leather one, which was half-full now, which was full of her: her hands, her jaw, the angle of her shoulder, the way the scarf lay on the seat beside her. He drew because drawing was the only thing that held the time in place. Without the drawing, the time expanded, and the expanded time was the time where the thoughts lived, and the thoughts were: she's not coming. It's been twenty-three days. She's not coming back.

8:00. The tea steamed. The booth was quiet.

8:05. Saoirse wiped the counter. Dottie orbited.

8:09.

The bell rang.

• • •

M O L L I E

She stood in the doorway.

Coat on. Scarf wound. The grey scarf. Her boots, the leaky ones, the fashion-adjacent ones, the ones that had been through things. She was thinner. He could see it from the booth, the coat hung differently, the scarf sat lower, the angles of her were sharper, the way angles got when a body wasn't being fed enough.

She was looking at the booth. At the tea. At him.

He didn't move. Didn't stand. Didn't speak. He sat in the booth and looked at her and she stood in the doorway and looked at him and the distance between them was twelve feet, the length of a diner, the space between the door and the window, and the twelve feet were the most charged twelve feet on the island of Newfoundland.

She walked to the booth. Slowly. Not the confident walk, not the coat-buttoned-to-the-throat walk of a woman arriving at a formal engagement. A different walk. Careful. The walk of someone who was not sure the ground would hold.

She sat down.

The booth creaked. The vinyl. The sound it always made, the sound he'd heard a hundred times, the sound that meant: she's here.

She wrapped her hands around the tea. Both hands. The ring catching the light. The same gesture. The first gesture. The thing she'd done the first morning in October when she'd walked into this diner and sat across from a stranger she'd agreed to die with.

☕︎

F A Y I Z

Ten minutes.

They didn't speak for ten minutes. He timed it on the crooked clock. He watched the minute hand move from 8:10 to 8:20 and in those ten minutes they sat in the booth and he drank his coffee and she drank her tea and neither of them said a word because the words were not ready because the silence was doing something the words couldn't.

The silence was healing something. He could feel it: the way you could feel a painting come together, the way you could feel a colour find its place. The silence was the undercoat. The silence was the primer. The silence was the thing that needed to be there before anything else could hold.

Dottie brought fresh tea at 8:15. She set it down without a word. Took the old cup. Left. Her face, for once, said nothing. Her face said: some moments don't need a Greek chorus. Some moments just need a refill.

Saoirse stayed behind the counter. He could see her in his peripheral vision, the red hair, the wide eyes, the hands that were gripping the cloth like it was the only thing keeping her upright. She didn't come to the table. She didn't bring menus. She understood, in the way that nineteen-year-olds who had lived too much understood, that the booth was a place where something was happening and the something required no witnesses.

At 8:20, Mollie spoke.

"You're still here."

Three words. She said them to the tea. To the cup. To the steam that rose between them in the morning light, the real light, the grey light, the light that was not warm, that was never warm, that he painted warm because of her.

He looked at her. Across the table. Across the booth. Across the distance that was smaller than the twelve feet of the diner and larger than anything either of them could measure.

"Where else would I be?" he said.

She looked up from the tea. Her eyes were red. Not crying red... days-of-crying red, the red that stained and stayed, the watermark of three weeks. She looked at him and the wall was gone. The mask was gone. The funeral-home professional and the armour and the four types of tiredness and every defense she'd built since Charlie died... gone. What was left was the face he'd been trying to paint for weeks. The real one. The one that was young and open and completely unprotected, the face of the girl at the grave, the face of a woman who had been loved and left and loved again and left again and was sitting in a booth in a diner in Newfoundland looking at a man who was still there.

Still there.

She picked up her tea. Drank it. All of it. The whole cup, the way she always used to, the way she'd stopped doing, the way a person drank something when they were staying.

She set the cup down.

They didn't talk about the confession. They didn't talk about April. They didn't talk about the three weeks or the missed calls or the floor or the plant or the painting she'd turned to the wall. They didn't talk about not fall in love with you or I'm working on deserving her or because it's Thursday.

They sat in the booth and the jukebox played something old and Dottie orbited and Saoirse filled salt shakers and the crooked clock ticked its crooked time and the light came through the window, the real light, grey and honest, and between them the silence did what their silence had always done: held everything they were and everything they weren't and asked nothing in return.

Under the table, Theodore pressed his head against Mollie's ankle. The full-surrender lean. The lean that said: you're back. That's enough. That's everything.

She reached down and put her hand on his head and Fayiz watched her do it and the word... the word he'd been waiting for, the word that Dottie said would come when he stopped looking... the word arrived.

Not with fanfare. Not with revelation. The way paint dried: slowly, invisibly, the surface changing without moving, the image becoming what it had always been. Not a new colour. The colour he'd been reaching for since October, finally mixed right.

He didn't say it. Not yet. The silence was doing enough. The silence was healing something that words would only break.

He picked up his coffee. She picked up her tea.

They drank.

☕︎