Not unchanged — there are threads of grey at his temples now, and he carries himself differently, more settled, less like someone waiting to be called back somewhere else. But the laugh is the same. The way he listens is the same — still, attentive, like whatever you’re saying is the only thing happening. The first time we spoke at the welcome dinner, he looked at me across the table and said, simply, “Ximena,” and it sounded like a sentence I hadn’t known was unfinished.
—
We have been circling each other for two days.
Not avoidance — something more complicated. We talk easily, the way you do with someone whose rhythms you learned long ago and haven’t entirely forgotten. We sat together at the hammam tea hour yesterday while Kavita’s mother, Aunty Sushila, delivered a running commentary on every life choice everyone at the table had ever made. We survived that. We laughed, quietly, into our respective glasses.
But we haven’t talked about Edinburgh. We haven’t talked about the gap. We haven’t talked about the photograph, or the promise, or the fact that we are, improbably, standing in the exact courtyard we looked at together on a rainy Tuesday when we were twenty-three years old and slightly less broke.
I think we are both afraid of what happens if we do.
—
Here is what I have been afraid of, specifically: that it will turn out to be nothing. That the thing I have carried quietly for eleven years — not grief, not longing exactly, more like an open question — will get an answer that is simply “we were young and it was nice and that’s all.”
I am thirty-four years old. I am not a person who believes in signs or fate or the romantic significance of coincidences. I am a structural engineer. I believe in load-bearing calculations and material tolerances and things that can be tested.
And yet.
Here is the courtyard. Here is the fountain. Here is Esteban Navarro, twelve hours from a train, standing in the exact light I once showed him on a screen.
—
Preethi corners me near the orange trees at some point in the evening. She is Kavita’s younger sister, twenty-six, and she has the family gift for surgical observation delivered in the most casual possible register.
“He keeps looking at you,” she says, eating a date from the platter on the low table between us.
“We’re friends,” I say.
“Mm.” She eats another date. “Friends who haven’t spoken in a decade and are doing this incredibly elaborate thing where you talk about everything except the actual thing.”
“What actual thing?”
She gives me a look that is devastating in its patience. “Ximena. You literally told me about the library. The photograph. The promise. You told me that on the flight here.”
“I was nervous about flying.”
“You talked for forty minutes.”
I look across the courtyard. Esteban is standing near the fountain now, talking to Kavita’s new husband, Rohan, who is enthusiastic and kind and currently gesturing at the tilework with the energy of someone who has just discovered he loves Moroccan architecture. Esteban listens, nods, smiles — and then, as if he feels the direction of my attention, looks up.
Our eyes meet across the fountain and the orange trees and the columns of evening light.
He holds it for a moment. Then he says something to Rohan, sets down his glass, and walks toward me.
Preethi says, very quietly, “Finally,” and disappears.
—
“Walk with me?” he says.
We go up to the roof terrace. The medina spreads below us in the last of the light — flat rooftops, minarets, the faint call to prayer dissolving into the warm air. The sky is that particular shade of deep blue that happens just before dark, when the city’s lights are starting to matter.
For a while we don’t say anything. It isn’t uncomfortable. It is the kind of silence that has weight and texture, the kind that means something is being decided.
“Kavita told me she didn’t tell you I was coming,” he says finally.
“She ambushed me,” I confirm. “She used the word facilitated.”
He laughs — that same laugh, head back, unguarded. “She told me you’d be here. She showed me a photo of this place. I said yes before she finished the sentence.”
Something shifts in my chest. Quietly. Like a weight that has been resting at an angle finally settling flat.
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