Chapter 4
CRUZ
I put the chair there and go inside before I can second-guess it.
Not a grand gesture. Not a statement. Just that she’s here for a month and her deck only has one chair and that seems like an oversight I can quietly correct without making it weird. That’s the whole logic. I’m not building a narrative around a chair.
I’m absolutely building a narrative around a chair.
I make eggs I actually cook correctly this time —no audience, no camera, no intentional chaos— and eat standing at my kitchen counter looking out at the shared railing and thinking about the way she said fourteen years like she was handing me a test.
I know what she was doing. She’s a lawyer; she builds arguments. She was laying out the case against whatever this is before it has a chance to become anything, preemptively closing a door she hasn’t decided whether to open.
The age gap.
The life-stage gap.
The daughters-older-than-me gap.
I heard all of it under the surface of those two words.
Here’s what she doesn’t know: I’m not arguing the case.
I’m not going to show up with a counter-brief and a list of reasons why the math doesn’t matter.
That’s not how this works and even if it were, Hannah Caldwell would see through it in about four seconds and I’d lose whatever ground I’m standing on.
What I’m going to do is be exactly who I am and let her figure out that I’m not a punchline.
That’s the whole plan.
I call my sister at noon because she has radar for when something is happening with me and if I don’t call her first she’ll call me at the worst possible moment with the worst possible timing and ask questions in that specific Maya way that makes me feel seventeen.
She picks up on the second ring. “You posted a grill fire video.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“The neighbor who saved you,” she says. “Tell me about her.”
I pause half a second too long.
“Cruz!”
“I just met her.”
“You paused.”
“I was chewing.”
“You called me,” Maya says, with the patience of someone who has known me for thirty-four years and has very little left to learn, “which means you want to talk about it. So talk.”
I lean against my kitchen counter and look at the ceiling and think about how to describe Hannah Caldwell to someone who will immediately make it larger than it is.
“She’s sharp,” I say finally. “Like— actually sharp, not performs sharp. She put out my grill fire and went back to her book and didn’t make it a whole thing and I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. ”
Maya is quiet for a moment. This is significant because Maya is rarely quiet.
“How old?” she asks softly.
“Forty-eight.”
Another pause. Then she groans, “Cruz.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to think—”
“I know what she’s going to think,” I say. “She’s already thinking it. She told me her older daughter is thirty.”
“Subtle.”
“She’s a lawyer. That was subtle, for her.”
Maya laughs, reluctant and fond. “And you’re still interested.”
It’s not really a question. “I put a chair on her deck.”
“Oh, you’re gone,” she says. “You are absolutely gone.”
I don’t argue with her because she’s not wrong.
I’m thirty-four years old and I’ve felt attraction before and I’ve felt connection before and I know the difference between both of those things and whatever is happening in my chest when I think about Hannah sitting in her single Adirondack chair looking at the ocean like it owes her something.
This is the third thing. The one I haven’t felt before.
“Just be careful,” Maya says, softer now. “Both of you.”
After we hang up I stand in my kitchen for a while with that word —careful— and think about the procedure scheduled for two weeks after I get home.
The cardiologist’s voice, measured and clinical, walking me through what’s happening with my heart and what they’re going to do about it and how the prognosis is good, excellent actually, nothing to panic about.
I haven’t told Maya. I haven’t told anyone.
I came here specifically to not tell anyone. Just to have a month where I’m just a person on a beach and not a person with a thing wrong with his heart that needs fixing. I’m allowed that. The procedure is scheduled, the surgeon is excellent, the outcome is expected to be fine.
I’m fine.
I’ll be fine.
I close my phone, change into running clothes, and head for the beach.
She’s there.
Of course she’s there. It’s a public beach, it’s the middle of the day, she’s on vacation, so she should be there. But I still feel it impact in my chest when I spot her, about a hundred yards down, sitting in the sand with a book that she is, this time, actually reading.
I run past.
I don’t stop. I don’t wave. I keep my pace and look straight ahead and give her the privacy she came here for.
But I slow down.
Just slightly. Just enough.
And when I loop back twenty minutes later she still hasn’t looked up, or if she has she’s not letting me see it, and I decide that’s fine.
That’s actually perfect.
Because this is day two and I’m not in a hurry.
I have a whole month.
So does she.