The coffee is already cold by the time Deirdre realizes she has been holding it for twenty minutes, just sitting there in the window seat of the little café on Rue Cler, watching the rain drag itself across the Paris street outside. Her colleague Fergus is talking — something about the quarterly report, something about the team dinner on Thursday — but his voice has become a pleasant, distant hum, like a radio left on in another room. Because Viktor is standing at the counter, and he is ordering in careful, deliberate French, and he does not know yet that she is here.
She watches the back of his head. The way he tilts it slightly when he listens. She has memorized that tilt without ever meaning to.
This is how it ends, she thinks. Or maybe this is how it starts. She is no longer certain which direction they are traveling.
—
Six weeks earlier, Deirdre had not known anyone named Viktor. She had not known this café, either — a narrow, warm-lit place tucked between a fromagerie and a flower stall, the kind of spot that feels like it exists slightly outside of time. She had found it by accident on her third morning in Paris, following the smell of roasting coffee and her own stubborn refusal to eat another hotel croissant alone at a table for one.
The team from the London office — herself, Fergus, Neville, and their manager Mervin — had been seconded to Paris for a two-month project with a French architectural firm. Mervin had announced this in the way Mervin announced everything: with tremendous enthusiasm and absolutely no practical detail. They would be collaborating closely, he said. It would be a wonderful cultural exchange, he said. He did not mention that the French team’s office was on the fourth floor with no lift, or that the espresso machine in the shared kitchen produced something that tasted primarily of regret.
So Deirdre had found the café on Rue Cler, and she had claimed a window seat, and she had been perfectly content.
Viktor arrived on the fourth morning.
She noticed him because he was reading a battered paperback copy of a Zbigniew Herbert poetry collection — in the original Polish — and she had spent an embarrassing semester in university trying and failing to learn Polish, and the sight of those particular vowel clusters still produced in her a specific, fond shame. He was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of quiet face that suggested he spent a great deal of time thinking about things he didn’t bother to say out loud. He ordered a double espresso. He did not look up from his book.
Deirdre looked back at her own laptop. She had work to do. She did the work.
He was there again the next morning. And the morning after that.
By the end of the first week, they had developed a wordless routine — the same window seats on opposite sides of the room, the same approximate arrival time, the same careful non-acknowledgment of each other’s existence that is, paradoxically, its own form of intimacy. Deirdre began to time her arrival so she would not miss him. She did not examine this too closely.
It was Fergus who ruined the comfortable silence, as Fergus tended to ruin most comfortable things. He had started joining her for morning coffee after the second week, arriving in a cloud of aftershave and cheerful noise, dropping into the seat across from her with the energy of a Labrador who has just discovered a very interesting stick. “Who’s the brooding one?” he said one morning, nodding toward Viktor’s corner with absolutely no subtlety whatsoever.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Deirdre said.
“Right,” said Fergus, and helped himself to her spare napkin.
The actual conversation — the first one — happened on a Tuesday, three weeks in, when the rain came down so hard that the flower stall outside disappeared entirely behind a curtain of grey water. The café filled up quickly, the way Paris cafés do in rain, with damp umbrellas and raised voices and the particular chaos of everyone wanting the same warm corner. Viktor’s usual seat was taken. The only available chair in the room was at Deirdre’s table.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, water on his shoulders, looking at the room. Then he looked at her. She looked back. She gestured, very slightly, at the empty chair.
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