15. Mira
MIRA
Katya called four times before I picked up, which was her way of letting me know that a text would not be sufficient this time.
"I'm not asking," she said, no hello, no lead-in. "I'm informing you. You're leaving that house tonight."
"I have depositions to read."
"You have depositions to read every night. Tonight you have chili dogs to eat and a friend to console, because I have had the worst week of my natural life and I need a witness."
I looked at the stack of claim files on the kitchen island, at the low gray light coming off my laptop screen, and found that I didn't actually want to say no. That alone should have told me something.
"Fine. Where?"
"Downtown. The place on Lafayette. Wear something that isn't a blazer."
I wore a blazer anyway, because old habits don't die just because someone tells them to, and I took it off in the car.
The diner was the kind of place that hadn't changed its counter stools since before I was born, red vinyl gone shiny and cracked at the seams, a case of pie by the register nobody ever seemed to order from.
Katya was already in a booth near the window, coat still on, hands wrapped around a coffee she wasn't drinking, and the second she saw me her whole face did something complicated, relief and outrage at once.
"Sit," she said. "You need to hear this sitting down."
I slid in across from her. "Should I be worried?"
"You should be honored. You are about to receive a full accounting of the worst date of my life, and I have had some contenders."
"What happened to Perry?"
"Perry is deceased. Not literally, don't look at me like that, I just mean he's dead to me, buried under a mountain of declined cards and secondhand sailboat lies. May he rest. This is a new disaster, and it's a good one, so brace yourself."
"Go."
"So you remember I told you about the guy from the gym. Nick."
"The one who does the thing with his jaw."
"He clenches it when he's thinking, it's not a crime, don't start.
" She dragged both hands down her face. "Okay.
So Nick invites me to this thing, he says it's a work event, very casual, come as you are.
I get there and it turns out the work event is a hockey game and the reason he wanted me there specifically is that he is the mascot. "
I set my water glass down carefully. "The mascot."
"That's him. He is, at this moment in his adult life, employed to wear a seven foot fox costume and throw t-shirts at children, and he did not think this was information I needed before I put on real jeans."
"Katya."
"It gets worse. So I'm sitting there, I'm being a supportive almost-girlfriend, I'm cheering for a fox I now know personally, and halfway through the second period the head gets stuck."
"Stuck how?"
"Stuck like it will not come off, stuck like a small child is trying to help him and just making it worse, stuck like eventually two members of the actual Red Wings organization had to escort him off the ice while he is blind and flailing inside a fox head, and I am sitting in section one hundred and four watching the man I have been kissing get led away like a hostage. "
I put my hand over my mouth, and it didn't help, the laugh came out anyway, sharp and surprised, the kind I hadn't done in a room with another person in longer than I wanted to admit.
"It is not funny," Katya said, grinning despite herself. "It was traumatic."
"It's a little funny."
"It was the least sexy thing I have ever witnessed and I once dated a man who brought his mother on our third date."
The waitress came by then, an older woman with a pencil behind her ear who clearly knew Katya by sight, and we ordered without needing menus, two coneys each, mustard, onion, no beans in the chili, the way it was supposed to be done downtown.
Katya kept going while we waited, working through the rest of it, how Nick had texted an apology that consisted entirely of a fox emoji, how she'd blocked him within the hour, how she'd already decided she was retiring from dating men who had a "work costume" of any kind.
By the time our coneys arrived, she'd moved on to a full character study of the fox itself, arguing that any respectable mascot union would have staged an intervention months ago, that this wasn't the first equipment failure, that she'd actually clocked warning signs at a company picnic over the summer and chosen to ignore them because he mixed a good drink.
I didn't have the heart to point out that dating a man whose résumé included the phrase "company picnic incident" was never going to end well.
She got there on her own by the time the check came, groaning into her hands like the realization physically hurt.
"What about you," she said, once the food came and she'd taken the edge off her outrage with a bite. "You've barely said a word. Usually you'd have picked this story apart by now, found me six red flags before the second period."
"I'm listening."
"You're somewhere else. You get this face." She pointed her fork at me. "That's the face. What's going on at home?"
I looked down at the chili dog in front of me, steam still coming off it, and thought about how to answer that honestly without handing her more than I meant to.
"It's fine," I said. "It's better than fine, actually."
"That's a very specific way to describe an arranged marriage to an enforcer."
"I know how it sounds."
"So explain it."
I turned my water glass a quarter turn on the table, buying a second. "For the first few weeks I used to sit in traffic on the way home and count down. Like there was a clock running the second I walked through that door. I don't do that anymore."
"That's new," Katya said, quieter this time, no mockery in it.
"The house is quiet. It's always quiet. But it stopped feeling like the kind of quiet where something's about to happen." I shrugged, because there wasn't a cleaner way to say it. "I used to brace for it. Now I just... go home."
Katya studied me for a second longer than was comfortable, then went back to her food like she'd decided not to push, which for her was practically an act of restraint.
"Well," she said. "Good. Somebody in this city should be having a normal night."
We stayed another hour, split a plate of fries neither of us needed, and by the time we walked out the sky had gone that flat downtown gray it turns before full dark, streetlights coming on early over empty sidewalks.
At the corner, on a whim I didn't examine too closely, I turned back into the diner and ordered two more coneys to go.
"Who's that for?" Katya asked, watching me.
"Nobody. Just in case."
She didn't say anything, but the look she gave me said she didn't believe a word of it, and honestly, neither did I.
The loft was dark when I let myself in except for the light over the stove, which meant Damian was still up, which he almost always was.
I found him in the kitchen in a plain gray shirt, sleeves pushed up, standing at the counter with a folder open in front of him that he closed the second he heard the door.
He didn't ask where I'd been. He never did.
He just looked at the paper bag in my hand.
"What's that?"
"Coney dogs. I was out with Katya." I set the bag on the counter between us. "There's two if you want one."
He looked at the bag like it might be a trick question, then reached in and unwrapped one, standing there the way he always ate when it wasn't a full meal, on his feet, no plate, like sitting down for it would be a concession he wasn't ready to make.
He took one bite. Then he stopped chewing, something in it making me actually watch him.
"This is Lafayette," he said.
"It's a coney dog, Damian."
"It is." He set it down on the wax paper like it had personally offended him. "You can tell by the chili. It's looser. American keeps it thick enough to hold together."
I stared at him. In eight weeks I had heard this man discuss debt structures and dead men and the precise wording of a threat without his voice changing once, and here he was, genuinely aggrieved over hot dog toppings.
"I didn't realize this was a controversy."
"It's not a debate. It's a fact." He picked the dog back up anyway, took another bite like his objection wasn't going to stop him from finishing it. "American's better. It's not close."
"They're next door to each other."
"It doesn't matter. It's still better."
"Based on what?"
"I've eaten both my whole life." He said it flatly, like the case rested itself, and reached for a napkin. "My father used to send me to American some evenings for the crew, when I was young enough that it was still a job I wanted. Lafayette closed early half the time. American never did."
It was such a small thing to say, but I understood, watching him say it, that it cost him something anyway. It was a door he didn't open for anyone, cracked an inch for a story about hot dogs and a father he never mentioned otherwise.
"So it's not really about the chili."
"The chili's the whole point. Everything else is garnish." But there was the smallest shift at the corner of his mouth when he said it, not quite a smile, more like the idea of one passing through. "It's just correct."
I hopped down to grab napkins from the drawer, mostly because I needed a second where I wasn't looking directly at him being like this, unguarded and stubborn and almost pleased about something as small as onions.
When I turned back he'd already claimed the rest of my coney off the counter and was working through it like a man who had never once considered asking permission.
"That one was mine."
"Not anymore."
"Damian."
"You weren't watching it. Possession's nine tenths."
"That's not how hot dogs work."
"It is now."
I laughed, actually laughed, and pulled myself up onto the counter across from him instead of taking a stool, because it put me at his eye level and because some part of me had stopped worrying about whether that was allowed.
"You know there are people in this city who would fight you over that opinion. "
"They'd be wrong."
"That's very confident for a man defending onions and mustard."
"I know what I like." He unwrapped the second one without asking if it was actually mine, and when I reached for it he held it just out of range, one eyebrow up, daring me to make an issue of it.
It was such an ordinary, small, human thing to do that for a second I forgot who he was supposed to be to me.
"Give me that."
"Say American's better."
"I've never had either."
He stopped, dog still held out of reach, and looked at me like I'd confessed to a felony. "Eight weeks in this city and you've never had a coney dog."
"I've had a coney dog tonight. I don't have a ranking."
"That's un-American."
"That's a terrible joke."
"It's accurate." He finally handed it over, and when our hands brushed neither of us pulled back fast the way we usually did, that quick, careful distance we'd both gotten so good at keeping.
We just stood there, at midnight, in a kitchen that smelled like onions and mustard, eating cheap chili dogs off wax paper like we were nineteen and not two people who'd signed a contract instead of falling into this.
"Katya's disaster of the week," I said, because I wanted to keep him talking, wanted to see what else was under there, "involved a man who works as a hockey mascot."
"In a costume."
"He got his head stuck right there on the ice, in front of a full arena."
Something happened to his face that I had genuinely never seen before, a real laugh, short and surprised out of him like it had gotten loose before he could decide whether to allow it, and it changed everything about him for just that second, the whole careful architecture of his expression coming apart into something young.
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard," he said.
"It got worse. He apologized with a fox emoji."
"Stop."
"I'm not making any of it up."
He shook his head, still half laughing, and reached out without seeming to think about it first, brushing a strand of hair back from my face where it had come loose against my cheek.
His hand stilled there a second longer than it needed to, just at my jaw, and the laughter between us didn't stop so much as it went quiet, settled into something else entirely.
I thought about the version of tonight I would have expected eight weeks ago, walking into a dark loft, testing the silence before I trusted it, keeping one ear turned toward the door in case the quiet decided to become something else.
There was none of that now. Just a kitchen that smelled like onions, a man who cared far too much about the correct chili ratio, and his hand still resting warm against the side of my face like neither of us had noticed it hadn't moved.
Neither of us moved.