The dinner, when it finally happened, was by all reasonable accounts a disaster in the specific way that only works out fine in hindsight — Theo showed up in the same slightly-too-formal blazer he'd clearly bought for the occasion, knocked over a glass of water within the first ten minutes, and spent the appetizer course accidentally explaining, in exhaustive structural detail, why the restaurant's ceiling beams were positioned incorrectly for the load they were bearing.
"I panicked," he admitted to Elena afterward, the two of them running into each other at the library the following week, Sophia mercifully out of earshot in the children's section. "I don't know why I do that. Structural engineering is apparently my emotional support topic."
"How did the rest of the evening go?"
"Better
