CHAPTER SEVEN
The restaurant was the kind of place that felt cozy and warm, and it was a direct result of the lighting.
It was not the almost mournful dimness of a trendy place trying too hard, but a warm, considered glow that came from actual candles on the tables and pendant lights above the bar.
The walls were exposed brick and the menu was written on a chalkboard behind the host stand, which Donna had noticed on the way in and had taken as a good sign.
She had a theory about chalkboard menus: places that used them and took their time with the lettering tended to take their time with everything else, too.
She had been right. The food was exceptional.
She had ordered the pan-seared halibut, which had arrived on a shallow pool of saffron broth with charred leeks arranged alongside it.
She had been working through it slowly for the past twenty minutes because she genuinely did not want it to end.
Mainly because of the man sitting across from her.
Vincent had ordered the short rib, and at some point early in the entree he had slid the plate a few inches across the table without comment so she could try a bite. She had. It was extraordinary, and she had told him so.
"I've been coming here for about two years," Vincent said. "I wasn't sure it was the right choice for tonight, actually. I thought it might be too quiet."
"It's exactly right," Donna said.
He smiled at her and a little flush of warmth passed all the way through her.
Vincent Godfrey was in his early sixties, with a calm, relaxed way of carrying himself that she had picked up on within the first five minutes.
He had dark eyes and a close-trimmed beard going gray at the edges.
Perhaps most importantly, he had been easy to talk to in a way she hadn't fully anticipated.
They had been messaging for three weeks, all online.
Online conversations had a particular ceiling, she had learned, and the person on the other side of one did not always match the person who showed up in person.
She’d had far too many experiences to prove that correct.
Tonight, he had exceeded the version of himself she had put together and imagined from those online exchanges.
He was warmer in person, and funnier, and he listened with a focused attention that she had stopped expecting from people a long time ago.
They had talked through most of dinner without effort: his work as an architect, her position managing the office of a mid-sized law firm; his two adult daughters, her son in his second year of college; his love for Broadway tunes, her preference for classic rock.
At some point the conversation had shifted to travel and they had spent a pleasant fifteen minutes comparing opinions on cities they had both visited.
Rome versus Florence. He had said Florence without hesitation.
She had argued Rome. It had been the most enjoyable disagreement she could remember having in years.
Donna had been divorced for fourteen months.
The marriage had lasted nine years and at least the last four of those had been suffocating.
That’s the exact word she’d used to describe it to Vincent.
Not dramatic or explosive, just steadily, quietly airless…
like a room with the windows painted shut.
When it finally ended she had felt mostly relief, and then guilt about the relief, and then a long flat stretch of nothing much that had lasted the better part of a year.
But lately something had shifted. She had started noticing things again.
Just small things really. Like the way the light looked in the late afternoon, the pleasure of a good meal when you’ve gotten almost but not quite full.
And because of that, and this unexpectedly amazing date with Vincent, she felt, in the most careful way she would allow herself to use the word, hopeful.
The dessert arrived an hour and fifteen minutes after they had sat down: a single slice of almond cake with a quenelle of mascarpone and a thin drizzle of honey across the top of the plate.
It was almost too pretty to eat. Donna took out her phone before she touched it and photographed it from above, then sent the image to her friend Rachel with four emojis.
Rachel would understand. Rachel had been asking about this date for three days.
"Did you just document your dessert?" Vincent asked, with a smirk.
"It warranted documentation." She set her phone face-down on the table. "I have a friend who has been very invested in how this evening went."
"And what will you tell her?"
Donna picked up her dessert fork. "I'll tell her the halibut was remarkable."
He laughed at that. It was a real laugh, unguarded and genuine, and she found herself smiling back without having decided to.
She lifted a small bite of the almond cake and let her gaze drift past him for a moment toward the bar.
She was starting to wonder if maybe they could extend this dinner with one more glass of wine.
The bar ran along the back wall, dark wood and low light, four or five people seated along its length.
Her eye moved across them without much purpose, and then it stopped.
There was a man at the far end of the bar.
He was sitting with a drink in front of him, but he was not looking at the drink.
He was looking at her. It was not a glancing look, either…
not a distracted sweep of the room. He was looking directly at her with a stillness that registered somewhere below the level of thought, the way a sound outside a window register before you've decided whether it means anything or not.
She held his gaze for less than a second before she looked away. Her attention went back to Vincent, who was saying something about the mascarpone. She smiled and agreed with whatever it was.
When she looked toward the bar again a few moments later, the stool at the far end was empty.
She scanned the length of the bar once, found nothing, and let it go.
A busy restaurant on a Wednesday night and a man who had glanced across the room.
It was nothing. She was not someone who invented things to worry about.
She had spent enough of the past few years worried about real things to have any energy left over for imagined ones.
Vincent was refilling her wine glass from the bottle they had ordered with dinner. Just a few inches, because they were both driving. She frowned internally. Maybe that one extra glass is out of the question, then. But really, she was only trying to think of ways to extend the date.
"I was going to suggest we take a walk," he said, setting the bottle back. "But it's gotten cold out. So maybe just the check?"
"The check," she agreed. "And maybe we do this again when it's warmer."
He looked pleased at that, in a quiet way, without making a production of it. "I'd like that. But…soon? Friday, maybe?”
Donna nodded, well aware that she was blushing.
She picked up her wine glass and looked at the remaining inch of it, at the way the candlelight moved inside the red.
Fourteen months since the divorce. Four years before that of a marriage that had made her feel invisible in her own home.
And now this: a candlelit restaurant, a plate of beautiful food, a man who laughed genuinely and looked at her like she was… like she was something.
It was not a large thing. She understood that. But after the stretch of time she'd been through, a not-large thing felt like exactly what she had needed.
She finished the wine and set the glass down gently.
Outside, through the restaurant's front window, the street was dark and quiet and completely still. And when they left ten minutes later, with Vincent’s hand on the small of her back, she had completely forgotten about the strange man sitting by himself at the end of the bar.