Their burgers arrived. They bumped elbows over the condiments and politely apologized; their obligatory small talk continued. It might as well have been any ordinary, semi-awkward first date. Violet kept waiting for him to bring up their meeting on the beach—and what came next, and why he’d chosen this moment to look for her. Had Katie been right that maybe he’d reached out through the universe before, and Violet had missed it? But he didn’t bring it up, and so Violet followed his lead. She was here because of his ad. He was the initiator. And so she would try to stick to his script of how this should go. She would be patient—she would not rush the conversation and risk ruining things. Because if there was one skill she’d had ample opportunity to hone these past two years, it was the art of waiting. And if there was one thing she’d already known how to do even before she first met Finn, it was improvise. For that, she could thank Gram.
After dinner, they walked around the corner to Graeter’s and got small paper cups of ice cream—Violet ordered raspberry chocolate chip, and when he said only, “I’ll have the same,” she couldn’t hide her smile. As they stepped into the crosswalk, headed toward the small rectangular park in the middle of the busy square, a sports car sped toward them, and he took her hand, looking almost comically alarmed. When it had passed, he didn’t let go. They found an empty bench and sat in silence for a moment, eating their ice cream thoughtfully as they watched the traffic go by.
Violet turned sideways on the bench and stretched her legs out across his lap. She did it without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and only after she saw the stunned look pass briefly across his face did she realize what an intimate gesture it was. No—a presumptive gesture. I know you already, it said. You belong on this bench next to me.
She was about to apologize, to retract her legs and face forward again, when his face changed. She’d meticulously flat-ironed her freshly cut and layered hair that morning, and he reached out and gathered the section to the right of her chin into his fingertips. He wound it through and around his fingers as he looked into her eyes, really looked into them, as if seeing her only then for the first time.
“Now I remember,” he said softly. The veil of awkwardness lifted. The smile that came next was more genuine—the smile of someone who was a little surprised to find himself sitting next to her this way, but happily so.
Here it was, finally, that current between them—that intensity of connection that had been missing from every other masculine encounter she’d had since that long-ago day on the beach. It was there. It was real. She hadn’t dreamt it. And now that this spark had again flickered, she was desperate not to be plunged back into that uncertain darkness. Now that she knew she hadn’t imagined the flame, she needed to know what it was that had brought them here—and what it was that had kept them apart. She wanted to know how he’d spent every moment of every day since they’d seen each other last.
“It’s been a long time, you know,” she said softly. “Why now?” Something like fear flashed in Finn’s eyes, and, worrying that she sounded more suspicious than she’d intended, she smiled coyly and tried for humor instead. “I mean, where have you been?”
She half expected some glib comeback, a battle of wits, but none came. He seemed to be considering her question seriously. She knew then that something about this man was different from the Finn she’d met on the beach. His almost automatic flirtation was gone, and in its place was something more measured. But still, he didn’t drop the lock of her hair he was holding. He didn’t let go. Some sort of explanation had to be given, after all, or at the very least gotten out of the way. He knew it, and she knew it.
“Did you ever think,” he said slowly, “that maybe when we were split up that day … did you ever think we should take that as a sign not to find each other? That anything beyond that conversation just wasn’t meant to be?”
She paused for only a second before answering honestly. “No, I didn’t. Is that what you thought?”
“No,” he admitted. He dropped her hair and gave her a sheepish smile. “But my dad always used to say that nothing worth having comes easily. Sometimes I think I take that advice to the extreme and can’t take a hint.”
His words were light, but there was real sadness in his expression. How he must miss his father. Violet felt a surge of tenderness for this man she hardly knew. She thought then that she’d been wrong—it didn’t really matter where he’d been all this time, what he’d been doing. The only thing that mattered was that he was here now.
She leaned toward him. “Well,” she said, “if you ever miss any of my hints in the future, I’ll be sure to let you know.” She inched closer still, until their noses were just inches apart. She looked at him with exaggerated eagerness, and he finally broke down and laughed—a genuine, warm sound that dissolved the moment of uncertainty. Here they were again, a woman and a man holding dishes of melting ice cream, her legs draped nonchalantly but purposefully across his lap, his arm wrapped now almost involuntarily around her knees, looking at each other so intimately that anyone walking by would surely look away.
“Would this be some sort of kissing-related hint?” he asked, touching the tip of his nose to hers.
“I knew you weren’t as bad at this as you thought.”
The familiarity between them took over then—maybe too quickly, she acknowledged now. After all, it had been false familiarity. Without cause. But it had seemed like such a natural fit, and such a miracle to have found each other again. Looking back later, Violet would remember feeling, above all, relieved. Perhaps not the most romantic notion on which to build a relationship—no one ever gushed about being relieved when they met their spouse, though wasn’t everyone relieved to stop looking for a match, relieved to stop being alone?—but it had felt good. It wasn’t run-of-the-mill relief. It was a feeling that things had been restored to their natural order. To the way they were supposed to be but very nearly hadn’t been. What was wrong with breathing a sigh at that?
A few months later, when she discovered she was pregnant, she wasn’t even all that nervous about telling him. Sure, it was sooner than she’d imagined, and everything was out of order—but didn’t that fit with the way things had gone between them? Wasn’t that just one more charming bump in the story of their love?
When he heard the news, though, he got quiet. And when he went home from her little duplex that night, rather than staying over as he usually did on Fridays, she cried herself to sleep, hoping Gram couldn’t hear her from her side of the walls.
But he was back in the morning, with her favorite cinnamon-sugar-crusted bagels and seasonal pumpkin spice lattes, decaf for her. “I guess we should get married,” he said, smiling apologetically, and it wasn’t really a proposal, but that was okay. It was them. They weren’t fancy. They just … they just were.