Chapter 7
HANNAH
It’s not a date.
I establish this clearly in my own mind while I’m finding my shoes, which takes longer than it should because I’m not looking for shoes, I’m looking at myself in the bathroom mirror having a very direct internal conversation about expectations and parameters and the importance of not reading into a neighborly dinner invitation from a man who is fourteen years younger and leaving in three weeks and is absolutely not my type even if my type has been no one for fourteen years which arguably means I don’t have a type anymore which is not a useful line of thinking right now.
I find my shoes.
I put on the earrings anyway. The good ones, the small gold hoops Cara gave me for my birthday last year. Because I feel like it. Not for any other reason.
The restaurant is exactly right — which I suspect is not an accident.
Not fancy, not trying too hard. A weathered building right on the water with a deck strung with lights and a menu written on a chalkboard and the kind of wine list that’s short enough to mean they’ve actually thought about it.
We get a table at the railing with the water below us and the evening sky doing something spectacular overhead and I sit down and think.
. he picked this on purpose, and then I think… . Stop it, Hannah.
“Good choice,” I tell him.
“I’ve been here every summer for six years,” he says, opening his menu. “The grouper is the right answer. Whatever else you’re considering, it’s the grouper.”
“I was going to get the salmon.”
He looks up.
“Too soon?” I ask.
He laughs. A surprised, real laugh that I’m starting to catalog against my will.
And the last of the ambient tension I carried from my apartment dissolves somewhere between the bread basket and the first glass of wine.
Here is the problem with Cruz Jackson over dinner.
He’s fully present in a way I’ve forgotten people can be.
Phone face-down on the table, untouched.
No scanning the room, no ambient distraction, none of the low-level performance anxiety I’ve noticed in men who are used to being watched.
He’s just here, with me, interested in what I’m saying with the specific quality of someone for whom this conversation is the only thing currently happening in the world.
It’s disarming in proportion to how rare it is.
We talk about everything and nothing in the way of good dinners.
His sustainable design philosophy, which is more nuanced and more passionate than I was prepared for.
The tension between preservation and progress.
The way he talks about buildings like they’re living things, like they breathe and adapt and have a relationship with their environment that good design should honor rather than override.
I ask him how he got into it. He tells me about his grandfather. A man who built things with his hands and who taught Cruz that the most important question before you put something into the world is whether it belongs there.
“That’s a good question,” I say.
“He was a good man.” Simple, warm. No performance in it.
I tell him about my grandmother, who was a court reporter for forty years and who taught me to listen to what people don’t say.
That the silence in a room tells you more than the testimony.
He listens to this like it’s interesting, because he finds it interesting, and I’m aware somewhere in the back of my mind that I can’t remember the last time I talked about her to someone new.
The grouper fish is, as promised, the right answer.
The wine is good and the evening is warm and somewhere in the second glass the last of my internal legal brief about why this is not a date dissolves quietly into the salt air.
It’s a date.
I know it’s a date.
I’ve known since I put on the earrings.
What I don’t know is what I’m going to do about it.
Cruz tops off my glass without asking, which I should object to and don’t, and leans back in his chair with the ease of a man who is comfortable everywhere, and says, “Tell me something nobody asks you.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
“You get asked about the firm,” he says. “Your daughters. Your cases. The impressive resume of Hannah Caldwell.” He looks at me steadily. “Tell me something that doesn’t make the highlight reel.”
It’s a good question. An uncomfortably good question, from someone who has no right to be asking it this well on what —is allegedly— not a date.
I think about it honestly. “I miss reading for pleasure,” I say finally.
“Not for strategy, not research, not because it’s good for my brain.
I used to read novels the way other people watch television— compulsively, constantly.
I had a book in my hand at every spare moment.
” I pause. “I can’t remember the last time I finished one just because I wanted to. ”
“Before this trip.”
I nod. “Before this trip.”
He nod in return. “That’s why the deck chair isn’t working.”
“I’m getting there.”
“You’ll get there,” he says, with a certainty that isn’t presumptuous, just — confident in me, which is a different thing. “What else?”
“That was my one.”
“That was a warm-up.”
I look at him across the table in the string lights and the wine-warm evening and I say, because apparently I’ve decided: “I’m lonely sometimes.
Not often. I’ve built a good life and I know it and I’m grateful for it.
” I keep my voice even, matter of fact. “But sometimes I sit in my house at eleven p.m. after a long case and the quiet feels like… too much of nothing. You know?”
He holds that carefully. Doesn’t rush to fill it, doesn’t offer reassurance, doesn’t make it smaller.
“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “I know.”
And the way he says it makes me think he actually does.
We walk back on the beach because the evening makes it obvious and neither of us suggests otherwise.
Shoes off again, waterline, the same comfortable silence we found this afternoon. The lights of the restaurant fade behind us and the beach gets darker and quieter and I’m aware of him beside me with the same stubborn awareness I’ve had since yesterday.
Specific.
Unwanted.
Undeniable.
We’re fifty yards from the walkway when he stops.
I stop.
He turns toward me and in the low light his expression is the most unguarded I’ve seen it —none of the easy charm, none of the grin. Just Cruz, looking at me like I’m something he’s been trying to figure out and has finally, quietly, understood.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks.
Two words I wasn’t ready for in that specific configuration. Not I want to kiss you, not a lean-in with implied question, not any of the usual machinery. Just the direct, respectful, completely certain ask.
I feel it move through me like the current I felt this afternoon, except stronger, except warmer, except I’m standing in the dark on a beach and there is no courtroom composure to hide behind.
“Yes,” I say.
He closes the distance slowly. Not hesitant.
Just deliberate. And giving me every opportunity to change my mind.
And when he kisses me it’s soft and certain and unhurried, one hand coming up to my jaw like I’m something worth being careful with, and it lasts only a moment before he pulls back and looks at me.
I feel seen in a way that is almost unbearable.
In a way I haven’t felt in so long I’d forgotten it was a thing that could happen.
“This is probably a mistake,” I say, because I’m me, because I cannot apparently stand in the dark on a beach and just let something be good without building the counterargument.
He looks at me —and there’s that expression, the quiet one, the one that isn’t the grin but is somehow more dangerous than the grin— and he says, “Probably. Still want to make it?”
And I kiss him this time.
Not soft. Not careful. The kind of kiss that has fourteen years of solitude behind it and a warm evening in front of it and absolutely no interest in being measured or reasonable.
His hand moves from my jaw into my hair and I feel him exhale like something releasing and I think distantly, clearly, like a verdict…
Oh, this is a problem.
This is the whole problem.
He’s not too young or too carefree or too much or any of the things I built the case around. He’s exactly this. Present and certain and looking at me like I’m art. That is so much more dangerous than anything I prepared for.
We break apart and the ocean is loud and my heart is doing something I haven’t authorized and Cruz is looking at me with that expression still, the certain quiet one.
“Come on,” he says softly. “I’ll walk you home.”
Like it’s the most natural thing. Like none of this is a big deal when it is absolutely a big deal.
I fall into step beside him.
Our hands find each other in the dark without either of us deciding it, fingers loosely linked, and neither of us mentions it.
We don’t have to.