Dinner that night was pasta. Gabriel had made it from scratch, which he seemed to do with everything, and it smelled good the way everything in his house always smelled good. Autumn sat across from him, ate it, and complimented it, hating herself a little for how easy the performance was getting.
They were halfway through when he put his fork down and looked at her. "Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Sure," she replied.
"What do you want your life to look like?" He said it in that easy, open way he always spoke, like he was genuinely curious. Like the answer mattered to him. "Not in five years. Not career stuff. Right now. If you could have anything, what would you actually want?"
She knew this question. Or not this exact question, but what it actually was. He'd been asking versions
