She sat alone at a small table near the entrance. A glass of water and a plate she had barely touched stood in front of her, and she was scrolling through her phone with the intense, exhausted focus of someone waiting for a message that never arrived. Her hair was pulled back loosely, and the skin around her eyes looked tired. She wore a simple sweater I did not recognize. The difference from the polished, laughing woman at Jenna's birthday party was striking.
I stopped for a fraction of a second. Emily noticed the change immediately and followed my gaze. She did not know Sarah well enough to recognize her without being told, but she could read my expression. "Everything okay?" she asked quietly.
"Yes," I said after a breath. "That's Sarah."
Emily looked toward the table, then back at me. "We can go somewhere else if you'd rather."
I considered it. Leaving would have been easy, and I had no interest in creating a scene or testing how far I had come. But I also did not want the possibility of encountering Sarah to dictate where I could eat dinner. The reservation was ours, and we had done nothing wrong by being there.
"No," I said. "We're okay. We don't have to make this about her."
Emily squeezed my hand once. The hostess led us toward a booth on the other side of the room, and I followed without looking back. I could feel my heart beating a little faster than usual, but the sensation passed when Emily sat down and began discussing which dishes sounded interesting. I opened the menu and forced myself to read it instead of rehearsing possible encounters.
We ordered drinks and shared a plate of roasted vegetables before choosing our main courses. Emily was telling me about a photograph recently donated to the museum, a picture that seemed to have been taken in front of a train station that no longer existed. She had spent the afternoon tracking down the building's location through old maps. I liked listening to her explain the search because her enthusiasm made the details feel important.
Halfway through her story, I glanced across the room and saw Sarah looking directly at me. Her phone lay forgotten beside her plate. For a moment her expression was blank, as if she were trying to reconcile the person in front of her with the messages she had sent and the conversations she had imagined having. Then her gaze moved to Emily, who was smiling at something I had said.
Sarah's face changed. I saw recognition, surprise, and something that looked like hurt. I did not feel triumph. What I felt was a brief, uncomfortable sadness for the way she had made choices that left us strangers in a room where we once would have sat together. I returned my attention to Emily and asked her to finish the story about the photograph.