“I moved the date,” I say slowly, “because every time it came around, I convinced myself the timing was wrong. That we were still too competitive. That she was probably with someone. That I had probably built the whole thing into something it was never meant to be.”
Gunnar says nothing. He has the wisdom, occasionally, to let a silence do its work.
“And the real reason?” he asks, after a moment.
The real reason is that the promise felt safe when it was five years away. It felt like something I could keep without actually having to be brave.
I don’t say this out loud. But Gunnar has known me for seventeen years, so he probably hears it anyway.
The café door opens.
Cold air moves in first, carrying the smell of rain and the harbour, and then Kateryna is standing in the doorway, unwinding a dark scarf from around her neck, her cheeks flushed from walking fast. She is wearing a coat the colour of charcoal and her dark hair is shorter than I remember — jaw-length now, practical, and somehow exactly right. She scans the room with those measuring grey eyes and when they land on me, something shifts in her expression. Not a smile yet. Something quieter and more complicated than a smile.
She crosses to the table. She does not say hello. She looks at me for a long moment and then she says, “You moved the date. Twice.”
“I know.”
“I flew from Warsaw to Riga and took a four-hour bus because you finally stopped moving it.”
“I know that too.”
Gunnar stands up with the cheerful efficiency of a man executing a plan. “I’ll get you a coffee,” he says to Kateryna, and disappears toward the counter in a way that makes it clear he will be taking a very long time about it.
Kateryna sits. She sets her scarf on the empty chair, smooths it once, and then looks at me directly in the way she has always done — no softening, no preamble, just the full weight of her attention. It used to feel like a challenge. Right now it feels like an open door.
“So,” she says. “One honest dinner. That was the agreement.”
“It was.”
“Are you going to be honest?”
The question lands cleanly, no sharpness in it. Just — the question. And I realise that this is what six years of circling has been moving toward, and that the ferry terminal and the contingency hotel room and all my careful exit routes were never really about leaving. They were about the terror of arriving.
“I moved the date,” I say, “because I was afraid that if we actually did this and it didn’t work, I would have to stop hoping. And I have been hoping for a very long time.”
Something moves across her face. Not surprise — she has never been easy to surprise — but something that looks like relief. Like a window opened in a room that has been closed too long.
“I rewrote your cantilever calculations the first week,” she says, “because they were correct and I needed you to know I understood them. I was showing off. For you.”
I stare at her.
“Your filing system was also perfectly logical,” she adds. “I reorganised it because I needed something to do with the feeling.”
“The feeling.”
“Of wanting to impress someone I had decided I was supposed to be competing with.”
Outside, a gust of wind moves through the Old Town and the café window trembles slightly in its frame. The sound of the harbour is faint but present, the way it always is in this city — a low, constant reminder that the sea is close and the world is larger than whatever room you are currently standing in.
I think about six years of friction and counter-proposals and the particular energy of two people who are very bad at saying a simple thing. I think about a Midsummer rooftop in Helsinki, a sky that refused to go dark, and a promise made in the space between arguing and something else entirely.
Gunnar reappears with Kateryna’s coffee and sets it down with the careful neutrality of someone who is absolutely listening to everything. He sits, picks up his own cup, and stares at the wall with theatrical innocence.
“So,” Kateryna says. Her voice is quieter now. “One honest dinner.”
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