The Summer We Forgot to Say Goodbye

Chapter 2 — Coffee Before Goodbye

The café on the corner was the kind of place Amelia usually walked past without noticing exposed brick, mismatched chairs, the smell of wet umbrellas and espresso but tonight it felt like the only warm, dry square footage left in the city, and she was grateful for it in a way that embarrassed her a little.

He held the door. Of course he did.

"Sit," he said, nodding toward a table by the window. "I'll get drinks. What do you want?"

"Something with too much caffeine in it and no judgment about that."

That earned her the almost-smile again, the private one, like he was rationing them. He walked to the counter, and Amelia used the thirty seconds of solitude to look at herself in the dark reflection of the window glass hair plastered flat, mascara doing something she didn't want to investigate and decided, with the particular recklessness of someone who has already had the worst day of her month, that she didn't care.

He came back with two coffees and, without asking, a blueberry muffin split in half on a napkin between them.

"I didn't order that."

"No. But you look like someone who hasn't eaten today, and I look like someone who's about to get lectured about it if I don't share."

"That's oddly specific."

"I have a mother." He said it like it explained everything, and somehow, it did.

They sat. The rain kept going outside, streaking gold under the streetlights, and for a moment neither of them said anything, just let the warmth of the cups do the talking. Amelia wrapped both hands around hers like it was the first steady thing she'd held all day.

"So," he said eventually. "No names. But I feel like I should know something about the woman who body-checked me on a public sidewalk."

"I didn't body-check you"

"You absolutely did. I have witnesses. The papers, mostly, and they're very upset about it."

She laughed actually laughed, surprising herself with it and something in her chest loosened for the first time since she'd walked into that interview eighteen minutes too short.

"Fine," she said. "You want to know something about me. Ask a question. Nothing that gives away who I am. Just a question."

He considered it with more seriousness than the game probably deserved, turning his cup a slow quarter-turn on the table. "What's the worst part of your day? The actual worst part, not the version you'd give a stranger."

She hadn't expected that. She'd expected favorite color or what do you do, something she could deflect with a joke. Instead she found herself answering honestly, the way she only ever did with Charlotte, and sometimes not even then.

"I had an interview today. A real one the kind where if I got it, I wouldn't have to lie awake doing math every night. I thought I was ready for it. I practiced answers in the mirror like an idiot." She turned her own cup, a mirror of his gesture, not quite meeting his eyes. "They said I didn't have enough experience. Which is true. But also I've never gotten the chance to have the experience, because everyone wants it already finished before they'll give you the room to build it. So it just it felt like being told I'm not allowed to start."

She stopped, aware she'd said more than the question probably wanted, and looked up half-expecting the polite, glazed sympathy people gave when they hadn't really been listening.

He wasn't giving her that. He was watching her like she'd handed him something worth holding carefully.

"That's not a small thing to carry into a rainstorm," he said quietly.

"It's fine. I'll survive it. I always do." She waved a hand, deflecting on reflex. "Your turn. Worst part of your day."

He was quiet for a beat too long, and she got the sense she'd stumbled onto something he didn't often say out loud either.

"I have a merger closing in six weeks that could either secure everything my father built, or lose it," he said. "Everyone around me has an opinion about how I should run it, and most of those opinions have nothing to do with what's actually right for the company. So I spend most of my day being told who I should be by people who've decided that in advance, and then going home and trying to remember who I actually am underneath it."

Amelia sat with that for a moment. It wasn't the answer of a man who'd had an ordinary day either.

"That sounds lonelier than mine," she said.

"It's a different flavor of the same thing, I think. Both of us being told what we're not allowed to be yet."

Something passed between them then not flirtation exactly, or not only that, but recognition. The specific, rare relief of being understood by a stranger who had no context for you and therefore no reason to lie about what he saw.

"This is a strange conversation to have with someone whose name I don't know," Amelia said.

"Is it better or worse than the ones you have with people whose names you do know?"

She thought about it honestly. "Better, so far."

"Then let's not ruin it." He nudged the muffin plate toward her. "Eat. You've had a day."

They talked for almost an hour after that not about jobs, not about mergers or interviews, but about smaller things that turned out to matter more: the way she couldn't sleep without a window cracked open even in winter, the fact that he'd never learned to swim properly and had been quietly avoiding pools his entire adult life rather than admit it, her sister's terrible taste in reality television, his conviction that pineapple belonged on pizza and hers that this made him legally untrustworthy.

It was, Amelia would think later, the easiest conversation she'd had with anyone in longer than she wanted to admit easier, even, than the ones she had with Charlotte, because there was no history here to navigate around, no old versions of herself he was comparing her to. Just this version, tonight, soaked and honest and unexpectedly light.

The rain eased outside. Neither of them mentioned it.

It was his phone that finally broke it, buzzing insistently against the table until he sighed and turned it over, silencing it before checking it properly.

"I should let you go," Amelia said, though she didn't especially want to. "You've probably got somewhere to be."

"I do." He didn't move to stand yet. "Can I ask you something, and you can say no?"

"Depends on the question."

"Can I see you again? Still no names, if that's what you want. Just this. Again."

Amelia hesitated, and it wasn't the rain or the ruined interview or the strange weightless honesty of the evening making the decision this time it was something quieter and more deliberate, a small yes forming somewhere under all the exhaustion.

"I'd like that," she admitted.

He smiled the real one again and reached for his phone to check the time, angling it briefly toward the table as he did.

It buzzed once more in his hand, the screen lighting up just long enough for Amelia to catch the notification banner before he silenced it again: 3 missed calls Diane (Assistant).

"Sorry," he said, standing and shrugging his coat back on. "Duty calls. Quite literally."

"Assistant?" The word slipped out before she could stop it, and something in his expression flickered a half-second too slow to cover.

"It's a long story," he said. "One I'll tell you next time. I promise."

He held the door for her again on the way out, and as they stood under the awning saying an awkward, unresolved sort of goodbye the kind that doesn't want to actually be a goodbye a black car pulled smoothly to the curb, and a man in a dark suit stepped out to open the rear door.

"Mr. Sinclair," the driver said, with the particular deference reserved for people whose names open doors on their own.

Amelia went very still.

She looked at the man she'd spent the last hour telling the truth to the muffin, the pineapple pizza opinions, the merger, the mother who'd apparently raised him to feed strangers and felt the ground shift very slightly under a day that had already been shifting all afternoon.

"Sinclair," she repeated slowly. "As in"

"As in that," he said, with the resigned, apologetic look of a man who had been hoping for one more hour before this exact moment. "I should have told you sooner. I was enjoying not being that, for a while."

Amelia thought, distantly, of the rejection email she still hadn't opened, sitting unread on her phone from a company she was fairly sure though she hadn't checked the letterhead closely enough in her rush to leave shared more than a passing resemblance to the name currently written across the side of the car in front of her.

"I have a feeling," he said quietly, "our story isn't over."

She didn't know, yet, exactly how right he was.