He was already there. Window seat, coffee in front of him, reading something on his phone that he set face-down the second he saw me, giving me his full attention before I'd even made it fully through the door.
He looked up when I walked in.
He didn't smile, exactly. He didn't say
“I knew you'd come” or make anything at all of the fact that I'd shown up.
He just pulled out the chair across from him, an unhurried, unremarkable gesture, as though I'd been meeting him here every morning for years instead of standing on the sidewalk two minutes earlier working up the nerve to open the door.
I sat down.
The woman behind the counter came over almost immediately, and he said,
"She'll have a flat white, one sugar," without so much as glancing at a menu, without turning to ask me if that
