The first thing Shanice said to him was: “You’re in my seat.”
It wasn’t her seat, technically. The small café tucked into a cobblestone side street near the Marais district in Paris had no reserved tables, no assigned corners. But she had been coming here every Tuesday and Thursday morning for eleven months, and the table by the window — the one with the view of the flower stall across the lane — had always been hers.
The man looked up from his book. Dark eyes, calm expression, not remotely apologetic.
“Is your name on it?”
“I’ve been sitting there since October of last year.”
“And now it’s September,” he said, “so you’ve had a good run.”
He went back to his book. She stood there for a moment, caught between irritation and something she didn’t quite have a name for, then sat at the next table over and ordered her usual: a double espresso and a pain au chocolat she never fully finished.
His name, she would learn three weeks later, was Massimo. He was Italian, an architect working on a restoration project near the Pompidou, and he had discovered the café by accident when he’d ducked in out of the rain. He came on Tuesdays and Thursdays because those were the mornings his meetings didn’t start until ten.
The same mornings as hers.
She didn’t tell him that right away. She told him her name was Shanice, that she was a translator working mostly for a publishing house on the Rive Gauche, and that she had very strong opinions about the croissants at this particular café versus every other café within walking distance.
“And the window table?” he asked, with a faint smile.
“Is still mine,” she said.
He had moved to the adjacent table by then — not because she’d asked, but because he’d arrived second that morning. She had noticed him noticing her when she came in, the way his eyes tracked her from the door to the counter before settling back on his page. She had noticed herself noticing that he’d noticed.
They talked in fragments, at first. A sentence between pages. An observation about the flower seller across the lane who sang to herself on cold mornings. A disagreement about whether the café’s playlist had gotten worse or whether they had both simply gotten older.
“Both,” Massimo said.
“Definitely both,” Shanice agreed.
It was easy, in the way that things are easy when they exist in a sealed-off pocket of time — a Tuesday morning, a Thursday morning, two hours before the rest of the day arrived with its weight. Shanice knew, somewhere beneath the ease of it, that the sealed pocket was the point. That she was allowing herself this because it stayed here, inside the café, inside those hours.
She did not think too hard about why.
The reason arrived on a Thursday in late October, in the form of a phone call she took outside on the cobblestones, her voice dropping low. When she came back in, Massimo glanced up and then looked away, and she sat down and wrapped both hands around her espresso cup and stared at the flower stall without seeing it.
“Everything alright?”
“Fine,” she said. Then: “No. Yes. It’s complicated.”
He waited. That was something she had noticed about him — he didn’t fill silences. He let them sit until they were ready to be filled.
“My partner,” she said finally. “We’ve been together six years. He’s… we’re…” She stopped. “We’re not in a good place right now.”
Massimo looked at her steadily. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” he said. And then, carefully: “Does he know you come here?”
It was a precise question. Not accusatory, not loaded — just precise. And it landed somewhere in the center of her chest because the answer was yes, Kadeem knew she came to the café, but he did not know about Massimo. Not because she had hidden him, exactly, but because she had not mentioned him. And she understood, sitting there with the question still hanging in the warm air between them, that the not-mentioning had been its own kind of decision.
“He knows about the café,” she said.
Massimo nodded slowly, and he did not ask anything else.
She appreciated that more than she could say.
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