The minute turned into three days.
Not awkward exactly — they were too practiced at being adults around each other for it to tip into awkward — but careful. A kind of mutual circling, both of them giving the other space without naming why. He didn't push. She didn't pull further away. They ate dinner together most evenings the way they had before Chicago, except now there was a current running underneath everything, low and constant, like a sound you stopped noticing only because you'd been listening to it so long.
On the fourth evening he left a book on the kitchen table — the one he'd said had the wrong ending, the one she'd been reading on the plane. A note tucked inside the cover in his handwriting, just three words: Still think so.
She'd smiled at that for longer than the joke dese
