She'd stopped going on Sundays six months ago.
She'd told herself it was because she was busy, which was true. She'd told herself it was because every Sunday left her feeling worse than when she arrived - still fond, still invisible, still patted on the head by a man who genuinely liked her and had never once seen her - and that this wasn't worth her limited free time. Also true. She'd told herself it was the mature thing. The self-protective thing.
She was also, if she was honest, doing the cowardly thing. It was easier to be absent than to sit across from Patrick at Sunday dinner and know, with complete clarity, that nothing was going to change. That she was thirty-one years old and she had let her teenage self set a compass bearing she was still walking in the direction of, and the destination wasn't real.
Her phone rang.
She looked at the screen. MOM. She let it ring twice - she always let it ring twice, it gave her a moment to put her face in order - and answered.
"Hey."
"Diana." Her mother's voice had its specific prepared-statement quality: measured, controlled, the tone she used when she was annoyed and had decided to remain reasonable about it anyway. "You didn't come home yesterday."
"I was packing. I'm at JFK right now."
"You sent me a text at six in the morning, I know." A brief pause. "Yesterday was Patrick's birthday."
There it was.
Diana turned slightly, putting her back to the man browsing the magazine rack nearby. "I know when his birthday is, Mom."
"He asked about you."
She pressed her free hand flat against her sternum, just briefly. "That's nice."
"Diana." Her mother paused, choosing her next approach carefully - she was good at this, good at identifying the angle that would land. "He made the herb-crusted lamb. He set a place."
She closed her eyes.
She knew exactly which lamb. She could picture it clearly without trying: the speckled cast-iron pan, the pale green of the herb crust catching color in Patrick's kitchen, the particular smell of it that had always meant Sunday afternoon. She could picture herself at seventeen, standing at his kitchen counter with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a ponytail, trying hard to look casual. He had guided her hand once, adjusting the angle of the knife - his hand over hers, briefly - and she had been concentrating so intensely on appearing normal that she hadn't registered the warmth of it until he'd already moved away.
She had been performing normal around Patrick for so long that she wasn't sure she knew how to do anything else in his presence.
"I'll call him when I'm back from LA," she said.
"That's what you said after Thanksgiving."
"Mom -"
"And after Christmas."
"I have to go." She kept her voice even, the way she kept her voice even in every professional situation that required steadiness. "Ethan's going to land soon."
"Diana." Her mother's voice shifted - softer now, and somehow worse for it. "He's not going to wait forever, sweetheart. At some point you need to -"
"Goodbye." She kept the word gentle. "I'll call when I land."
She hung up before her mother could finish the sentence.
She stood still. Phone against her sternum. Eyes on the postcard rack without seeing it.
Her eyes were burning. She was not going to cry in a JFK gift shop. She had a firm rule about public spaces and crying that had carried her through two breakups, a bar exam she'd failed once and never told anyone about, and three years of being available at seven in the morning for a man whose company she helped run without having her name on any of it. She was excellent at the rule.
She took a breath. Then another.
He's not going to wait forever.
As if Patrick were waiting. As if Patrick, who called her "Diana" with the warm uncomplicated fondness of a man who had watched her grow up, who appeared at Sunday dinners and made room for her at the table and asked how she was doing with genuine interest - as if any of that added up to waiting.
He wasn't waiting. He had never been waiting. He was a fifty-seven-year-old senior partner at a Manhattan law firm who liked cooking on Sundays and was kind to the daughter of his oldest friend.
Diana was the one who was waiting, and she didn't even know what she was waiting for anymore. She just hadn't figured out how to stop.
She set down the Brooklyn Bridge postcard she'd been holding without knowing she'd picked it up. Reached for a different one: a lighthouse on a rocky coast, labeled "Upstate New York" with the cheerful geographical inaccuracy of airport merchandise. She turned it over. Blank on the back.
She was staring at the blank back of the lighthouse postcard, thinking about nothing, when the world shifted.
She didn't hear him approach.
There was no warning. No footstep she caught, no rustle of fabric, no peripheral movement that would have allowed her to brace. One moment she was standing alone at the rack with the lighthouse postcard in both hands, and the next, two arms came around her from behind.
Not a grab. That was the thing she would turn over in her mind later - it wasn't aggressive or surprising in the way of a physical threat. The arms came around her with the ease of someone who had done this a thousand times before, crossing at the wrist just below her collarbone, settling with a certainty that wasn't calculated. Like returning to a place you knew exactly.
She felt the solid weight of a body against her back. Taller. Considerably taller.