Chapter 18
The evening market smelled like funnel cake and someone’s overambitious food truck experiment with brisket egg rolls, and I had a paper boat of them balanced against my hip when I saw Mark.
I knew it was him before my brain finished processing the shape of him, which is a strange thing about people you used to love.
Some part of you keeps a silhouette on file long after you’ve stopped checking for it on purpose.
He was standing at a booth selling hand-poured candles, laughing at something the woman beside him said, and the laugh was the same laugh, easy and a little too loud, the one that used to make me feel like I’d won something just by causing it.
“That’s Mark,” I said, before I could decide whether saying it out loud was a good idea.
Caleb didn’t turn his head fast. He did the thing he always did, a slow recalibration of attention that looked almost lazy if you didn’t know him, and I did know him now, well enough to see the exact moment his focus landed and held. “Mark Fenner,” he said. Not a question.
“You already know his last name.”
“I know a lot of things. I’m choosing not to use most of them tonight.” He said it evenly, and I appreciated the restraint in it more than I let my face show. It wasn’t a threat sitting behind his teeth. It was just information he’d decided didn’t belong in this particular room.
Mark saw me a second later, and I watched recognition move through his face, then a small jolt of panic, then the visible effort of deciding what expression a person is supposed to wear when they run into an ex-fiancée at a candle booth.
He said something to the woman next to him, clearly his date, the way his hand found the small of her back without thinking about it, and she looked over too, polite and a little wary, the universal expression of someone being introduced to history they didn’t ask for.
“Josie.” Mark came toward us with his hands doing an awkward half gesture, like he’d started to go for a hug and reconsidered somewhere around chest height. “Hi. Wow. Small city.”
“It’s a big city, Mark. You just have predictable taste in candles.”
He laughed, too quick, the nervous kind. “This is my girlfriend.” He gestured at the woman beside him, who gave me a wave that tried very hard to be normal. “Josie and I were together for a while. Before that.”
“We were engaged,” I said, because if he was going to be delicate about it I could at least be accurate. “For almost a year.”
“Right. Yes.” Mark’s eyes moved to Caleb the way eyes do when they’re grateful for a new subject, any new subject. “And you are?”
“Caleb Rourke,” Caleb said, and shook Mark’s hand with the exact right amount of pressure.
He had more than a name sitting in reserve, Mark’s employer, his neighborhood, the shape of how the engagement had ended, all of which he had disclosed to me at dinner.
He reached for none of it. The handshake stayed a handshake, and a small stubborn knot in my chest loosened.
“Good to meet you,” Mark said, and meant it, in the harmless way people mean things they don’t think much about. “You two out enjoying the market?”
“Dinner after,” I said. “There’s a little place off the square that doesn’t have a forty-minute line.”
“Smart.” Mark glanced at his girlfriend, then back at me, and I watched him decide to be brave about something. “You look good, Josie. Happy. I’m glad.”
“I am happy,” I said, and it came out simpler than I expected. Underneath it, an old reflex bristled, the memory of standing in our kitchen while Mark explained why he was giving the ring back and the specific shame of being told, kindly, that I was too much.
We did the rest of the small talk quickly, the way you do when everyone in the conversation wants it to end without anyone having to be the one who ends it, and then his girlfriend found a reason to want to look at scarves two booths down, and Mark went with her, and that was the whole encounter, maybe ninety seconds of my life I would have sworn a year ago might undo me and instead left me mostly hungry again, and a little raw in a place I hadn’t expected to still be tender.
The restaurant Caleb had found was small enough that the hostess knew him by his first order, a narrow room with candles that were actual fire hazards and a menu that didn’t bother explaining itself.
We got a table by the window, and he ordered wine for both of us without asking, then looked up and asked anyway, which was such a specifically Caleb piece of choreography that I laughed before the waiter had even left.
“He found me exhausting,” I said, once we’d settled, turning my glass by the stem instead of looking at him.
“That was the actual word he used, the last real conversation we had before the ring came back. Not cruel about it. He wasn’t cruel.
He just said he felt like he was always one beat behind me, and it was tiring, being one beat behind somebody, all the time, forever. ”
“He wasn’t wrong that you move fast.”
“Thanks, very supportive.”
“I’m not finished.” Caleb tilted his head. “He wasn’t wrong that you move fast. He was wrong to make that a flaw. The part he found exhausting is the part I can’t look away from.”
“That’s a very romantic way to admit you’re a stalker.”
“I contain both truths comfortably.” He said it dry enough that I laughed again, and he studied my laugh the way he studied most things, like data he intended to keep.
We ate while a pan hissed somewhere in the kitchen and the candle between us guttered, neither of us rushing to fill the quiet. He nudged the last brisket egg roll toward me without comment. I took it without asking.
“My turn,” I said eventually, once the plates were mostly cleared. “What frightens you?”
He didn’t answer right away, which told me something before he said a single word. When he did speak, his voice had gone careful in the specific way I was learning meant he’d chosen his sentence for the angle it gave him rather than the whole truth of where he actually wanted to be.
“Losing a subject in a crowd,” he said. “Bad sightline, too many exits, no way to reacquire visual. It’s the thing that still wakes me up some nights, thinking through the ones I almost lost.”
It was true and not the whole answer. I heard the gap between them as clearly as a bad mechanism refusing to catch.
I didn’t push. Not yet. I filed it instead, the way he’d taught me without meaning to, and reached over to steal the last bite off his plate before he could get to it first.