She was quiet. Then she said, "That's a distinction I haven't heard anybody make in a very long time."
We agreed to meet for coffee in daylight later that week, somewhere nowhere near the hotel. We both said the same thing almost simultaneously: no expectations. It made us laugh, a little awkwardly, and for a minute I could hear the woman beneath the exhaustion. When the call ended, I looked around my kitchen, at the repaired drawer pull and the grocery list still on the refrigerator. A house could be familiar and strange at the same time. Apparently so could a future.
I chose a bakery on Spruce Street for our meeting because I had never been there with Sabrina. That consideration embarrassed me, but I was beginning to understand how much of Philadelphia I had mapped according to my marriage. The Italian restaurant where we celebrated promotions, the corner near the old bookstore where she told me she wanted children someday, the small park where we'd fought about whether to move to the suburbs: each place carried a story that had suddenly acquired an ending I hadn't expected. I needed one table in one room without a ghost sitting beside me.
Nora arrived with rain on her coat and a canvas bag over one shoulder. She looked healthier than she had in the hotel lobby, although sleep had not been generous to her. Her hair was loose, and she wore a moss-green sweater that made her seem less like a person bracing for bad news. When she sat down, she placed her phone facedown on the table, then noticed what she'd done and turned it over with a faint, rueful smile.
"Colin used to do that," she said. "I never thought anything of it until I started noticing everything. Now I can't put my phone down without wondering what it means."
"It means you put your phone down." I pushed a menu toward her. "Maybe we can let one ordinary thing stay ordinary."
She smiled, small but real. We ordered coffee, eggs, and two thick slices of toast. For the first ten minutes we talked about the weather, the difficulty of finding parking, and the construction outside the bakery. It was awkward until she asked about my work, and I began explaining why a building built in 1890 could sometimes be repaired more easily than one built seventy years later.
"The materials don't apologize for what they are," I said. "Old brick, old mortar, wood that was cut before anybody cared about conserving timber. You have to understand how it was meant to carry weight before you decide what to replace."
Nora leaned forward. "That's almost exactly what I tell people when they bring an old picture frame into my shop."
"You have a shop?"
"Alder & Frame, on South Street. Custom framing, old photographs, sometimes small conservation jobs. My father started it, and I bought it from him when he retired." She stirred her coffee.