The business card arrived on a Thursday.
It came via Marcus, who came via Kira, who came via whatever instinct it is that certain people have — the ones who understand, without being told, that two people standing in the same corner of a room looking at the same photograph is information. Kira had slipped the card to Marcus at the end of the evening with a look that communicated precisely as much as she intended it to, which, in Kira's case, was always exactly enough.
Marcus set it on Damien's desk on Thursday morning without comment, which was, in its own way, the loudest thing he could have done.
Damien looked at it.
Calloway Events. Mia Calloway, Founder. A phone number and an email address and a small embossed logo — two overlapping circles that might have been a Venn diagram or might have been something else, abstract enough to be interesting. The card was a particular shade of cream that was not quite white, the font precise and unornamental. It told him something about how she wanted to be seen professionally, and it matched what he'd observed of her at the gallery — present, direct, none of the decorative excess that people use to compensate for uncertainty.
He put it in the front pocket of his notebook.
He told himself he was not going to use it immediately, because immediately would mean something he wasn't ready to examine. He had a reasonable set of reasons for this: he was in the middle of two projects, he was not someone who acted on impulse, and the last time he had moved toward a person without sufficient caution he had ended up spending four months living with the negative shape of her in his apartment.
He made it six days.
Mia, during those six days, was doing the work.
This was how she'd come to think of the things Dr. Anand gave her to do — not assignments, which implied a classroom, not homework, which implied obligation. The work. Small, specific, unglamorous actions in the direction of her own interior. Dr. Anand had called her back the day after she'd left the voicemail, with the unhurried efficiency of a woman who had been expecting the call, and they'd had their first session back over video because Mia had not yet managed to be ready for the physical chair, the specific intimacy of that room.
"You're resistant to being seen," Dr. Anand had said, in the first fifteen minutes, which was faster than Mia had hoped. "Not by other people — you manage that reasonably well. By yourself."
"I see myself clearly," Mia had said.
"You see your patterns clearly. That's different. A pattern is a thing you can watch from a distance. Seeing yourself is — closer than that. Less comfortable."
This was the thing about Dr. Anand that Mia had forgotten in the two years away: she did not let you build a safe distance from your own material. Other therapists Mia had seen — briefly, at various crisis points in her late twenties — had allowed a kind of managed engagement with difficult things, a studied approach from three steps back. Dr. Anand walked you up to the thing and stood beside you and said: look. Not unkindly. Just insistently.
The work this week was a list. Not a feelings journal — Mia had made her skepticism about feelings journals clear and Dr. Anand had accepted this without argument, which was itself a form of argument — but a specific list. Three ways in which she had, in her relationship with Jack, prioritized managing his comfort over communicating her needs. Just three. Concrete, specific, with dates if she could remember them.
She had written eleven before she made herself stop.
She had not known it was eleven. She had thought perhaps it would be difficult to find three, that the list would require reaching and remembering and the effortful excavation of things she'd buried. Instead they had come out in a rush, one leading to another with the ugly momentum of an admission that has been waiting too long, and she had sat at her kitchen table with the list and felt something that was not quite grief and not quite anger and not quite relief but occupied the territory between all three.
She had texted Renata: I wrote a list and it turned into eleven things and I feel like I've been conned by my own memory.
Renata had responded: The memory didn't con you. It was just waiting for you to ask the right question.
Mia had looked at this for a long time. Then she'd put her phone face-down and stared at the eleven items on the list, and she'd tried to find the version of herself who had made those decisions — who had said nothing about the birthday dinner he'd forgotten to arrange, who had told him she was fine when she wasn't, who had stopped mentioning the thing she needed because the maintenance of his ease had started to feel more important than the having of the thing — and she'd found her quickly. Too quickly. She was right there, recognizable, still available, still capable of the same choices if the conditions were right.
That was the part that sat heaviest.
Not that she'd done those things with Jack. That she'd do them again, with someone new, without intervention. Without the work.
On the Wednesday of that week she met with a new client in the morning — a woman named Sylvia Brandt who was planning her daughter's quinceañera and who had the specific quality of parent that believes unlimited detail in the brief is equivalent to being easy to work with, which it is not, but which Mia had long ago learned to absorb with patience — and then in the afternoon she drove out to a venue in Decatur to walk the space for the anniversary party she was coordinating in October.
The venue was an old mill building, converted, the kind of space Atlanta did well — industrial bones softened by intelligent renovation, the original heart of the thing still visible inside whatever the new thing had become. She walked through it with the site manager, a young woman named Priya who had memorized every load-bearing wall and electrical outlet and was visibly proud of this knowledge, which Mia found charming. She asked the right questions and took photographs and made notes in the notebook she kept for each event — not digital notes, actual handwritten notes, because something about the physical motion helped her see the space rather than just document it.
She was standing near the back windows, which looked out over a small creek and a stand of old hardwoods going rust and gold at the tips, when her phone rang.
A number she didn't recognize. Atlanta area code.
She almost let it go to voicemail. Then something — she would not have been able to name it, the instinct that operates below the level of reason — made her answer.
"Mia Calloway," she said, the way she always answered calls from numbers she didn't know: professionally, giving nothing.
A brief pause. "This is Damien Cole. We met at the Adeyemi opening last week."
She was standing at the windows looking at the creek. She was aware, suddenly, of the quality of the light — afternoon, amber, falling across the old wooden floor at the long angle of late September.
"I remember," she said. She did not say: I've thought about it. She did not say: I wondered if you'd call.
"Kira gave my colleague your card. I hope that's alright."
"Kira gives everyone's card to everyone," Mia said. "It's basically her hobby. Yes, it's fine."
Another brief pause, different from the first. The first had been preparatory. This one was something else — she had the impression of a person considering how much ground to cover and choosing to cover less rather than more.
"I was going to propose coffee," he said. "If that's something you'd be interested in."
Not dinner. Not drinks, which would have been an evening proposition with all that evenings implied. Coffee. Daytime. Finite. She approved of the precision, even as she noticed she was approving of it, which was itself a thing to notice.
"What part of the city are you in?" she asked.
"Midtown, mostly. I'm flexible."
"There's a place in Poncey-Highland," she said. "Called Finca. Do you know it?"
"I'll find it."
"Saturday morning? Around ten?"
"Saturday at ten," he said. "Good."
She hung up, and stood for another moment at the windows, and did not examine the sensation in her chest, which was faint but legible, the very early warning signal of something she had not decided yet whether she was going to let herself feel.
Priya appeared at her elbow. "Everything okay?"
"Yes," Mia said. "Sorry. Let's look at the east entrance."
She followed Priya toward the east entrance and was already, in the back room of her mind, editing the list of eleven things.
She told Renata that night, over dinner at Renata's apartment, which smelled of the lamb stew Renata made when she was processing something and needed her hands occupied — an observation Mia made silently, because Renata's interior weather was Renata's to announce in her own time.
"The architect," Renata said.
"How do you know he's an architect?"
"Because you described him as an architect when you mentioned the gallery opening last week and then immediately talked about something else, which is how you talk about things you're not ready to talk about."
Mia looked at her. "I don't do that."
"You absolutely do that." Renata stirred the stew. "What's he like?"
Mia considered this. It was, she was finding, a harder question than it should have been, because the words that came first were the obvious ones — tall, quiet, careful — and they were accurate but they were also the outline of a person rather than the person. What he was like was harder to articulate. He was someone who paid attention. He was someone who said things slowly, not because he spoke slowly but because he thought before he spoke, which was rarer than it should have been. He had looked at the photograph in the corner for a long time, and looking is a form of respect that not everyone gives to things they haven't made.
"He noticed the skylights," she said. "Before he looked at any of the art. He walked in and checked the light source."
Renata looked at her with calm patience.
"I know," Mia said. "That's a strange thing to lead with."
"It's not strange at all. It's just very specific. Which is how you think about people you find interesting." Renata tasted the stew, added something. "Are you nervous about Saturday?"
"It's coffee."
"You've had coffee with interesting men before. Are you nervous?"
Mia moved a piece of bread around the cutting board in front of her. "I'm aware of myself," she said finally. "In a way I'm not always aware of myself. Which is — different from nervous."
"It's the beginning of nervous," Renata said, not unkindly.
"I'm three weeks out of a two-year relationship."
"I know."
"I have eleven items on a list that Dr. Anand gave me that are essentially an autobiography of my own worst habits in relationships."
"I know that too."
"This is probably terrible timing."
Renata set down the spoon and turned to look at her directly. "Mia. It's coffee. You don't have to make it into anything. You don't have to protect yourself from a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning."
Mia looked at her.
"You're allowed," Renata said. "You're allowed to go and sit across from someone interesting and have a conversation. That's all."
"I know I'm allowed."
"Your face says otherwise."
Mia picked up the piece of bread. She knew Renata was right. She also knew, in a way she couldn't fully explain, that this particular awareness — the way she was already slightly conscious of every decision before it was made, already cataloguing, already preparing to manage — was exactly what Dr. Anand had been pointing at when she'd said seeing yourself is closer than that. Less comfortable.
She was watching herself be interested in a person from the outside, as if interest were something that happened to other people and she was a reporter covering the event.
She was doing it right now.
"I'll go," she said. "And I'll just — be there. Not anywhere else."
"Revolutionary," said Renata, and turned back to the stove.
Saturday arrived with the particular quality of Atlanta in early October: a morning so clear and newly cool it felt like an apology for the summer, the light different now, sharpened by the angle of the season, everything slightly more itself. Mia walked to Finca because it was twelve minutes from her apartment and she needed the twelve minutes to settle into her own skin, which she did by walking fast and looking at the street and not letting herself rehearse anything.
She arrived two minutes early. He was already there.
This she noted: he was already there. Not because she was tracking for signs — she had told herself she was not tracking for signs — but because it was a piece of information she filed alongside the precision of his coffee suggestion, the Saturday morning rather than the Friday evening, the lack of anything in his manner that asked her to manage his anxiety about the meeting. He was sitting at a table by the window with his jacket on the back of the chair and a coffee already in front of him, reading something on his phone that he put down immediately when she walked in, not performing the putting-down but simply doing it, as if her arrival were the more interesting thing.
"You're early," she said.
"I'm always early," he said. "It's a failing."
"I was early too."
"I noticed." A brief pause. "I've been here ten minutes."
She sat. "So it's not exactly a failing."
"It implies I had nothing better to do at nine-fifty on a Saturday."
"Did you?"
He considered this with the seriousness she was starting to recognize as characteristic — not solemnity, not the performance of depth, but a genuine weighing of the question before answering it. "No," he said. "Not really."
She ordered her coffee. They were in the particular social space of two people who have had one good conversation and are discovering whether the good conversation was the whole of it or just the beginning, and both of them were aware of the space and neither of them was pretending not to be, which itself was a form of honesty she found she preferred to the pretending.
"How's the cantilever?" she asked.
He looked at her. "I mentioned a cantilever?"
"You mentioned a project with a structural issue you were working through. I assumed cantilever because you made a specific shape with your hands that I've only ever seen architects make when they're describing something cantilevered."
He looked at his hands, as if checking them for evidence. "It's resolved," he said. "It was a unit error. Embarrassing but fixable."
"Most things are," Mia said.
It landed slightly differently than she'd intended — or perhaps exactly as she'd intended, she wasn't sure yet. He received it without making anything of it, which was the right response, and they moved on into the conversation the way the previous one had moved, sideways and then forward, not directly toward anything but always arriving somewhere.
He asked about the gallery setup — specifically about the bar placement, which caught her off guard, because no one had ever asked her about bar placement. She told him about reading the space during the walkthrough, about the way the room's geometry created a natural flow that the obvious bar location would have interrupted, about how if you put the drinks too close to the entrance you turn the whole event into a lobby.
"You think in terms of movement," he said.
"I think in terms of what people do when they're not thinking about what they're doing," she said. "Which is most of the time."
"That's what I do," he said. "With buildings. You design for the unconscious occupant. The person who's thinking about their meeting or their dinner or their argument, not about where to put their feet."
"And if you get it right they never know."
"And if you get it right they never know," he agreed.
They were quiet for a moment, in the comfortable way rather than the uncomfortable way, which is a significant distinction that some people never achieve with someone they've known for less than a week. Outside, Poncey-Highland was doing its Saturday morning — foot traffic, a woman with a dog who stopped to check her phone without releasing the leash, a man unloading boxes from a van with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this hundreds of times and sees no reason to vary his system.
"Can I ask you something?" Mia said.
"Yes."
She had not planned to ask this. It arrived with the confidence of an impulse that had been waiting for a gap. "At the gallery, you were — I watched you for a while before we spoke. You were there, but you weren't entirely. And I recognized it because I do the same thing. The being there and being somewhere else at the same time." She held his gaze. "What were you somewhere else about?"
The question sat between them.
He did not deflect. He did not smile past it or give her the manageable surface answer. He looked at her with the focused patience she was already beginning to understand was simply how he looked at things he was taking seriously.
"Someone I was with," he said. "It ended four months ago. I was still — I was still doing the accounting."
"The accounting."
"Working out what belonged to the relationship and what belonged to me. They get mixed up. And then you have to sort through it." He paused. "You were at the gallery for work. But you were also somewhere else."
It was not a question. She had made it a statement, and he gave it back the same way, which meant it was not a demand, just an acknowledgment.
"Someone I was with," she said. "Three weeks." She watched his face do nothing dramatic with this information. "He messaged me the morning before the gallery. And I was — still finding my footing after reading it."
"Did you respond?"
"I said I'd see him. Once. To close it properly."
He nodded slowly, the way he did when he was receiving information rather than reacting to it. "Have you?"
"Not yet." She turned her coffee cup in its saucer. "I'm working up to it."
"What does working up to it involve?"
"Understanding my own part in it, first." She looked up. "I have a habit of managing the people I'm with. Organizing their comfort at the expense of — other things. I do it well enough that it takes a while to notice I'm doing it. And by the time you notice, the pattern's set and you're living inside it." She said it plainly, the way she'd been practicing saying true things plainly, with Dr. Anand as the trial audience. "I want to understand it before I sit across from him. Otherwise I'll just manage that conversation too, and I'll come away with something that feels like closure but isn't."
Damien was quiet. Outside, the man with the boxes had finished unloading and driven away. The woman with the dog had continued down the street, the dog apparently satisfied with its phone-checking stop.
"That's a considerable thing to know about yourself," he said.
"It's been three very efficient therapy sessions."
"Is it working?"
"Too early to tell." She looked at him. "What about you? The accounting — is it done?"
He was quiet for a beat longer than the previous answers. "I'm better at buildings than people," he said. "Buildings give you feedback. They tell you when something doesn't work. People are — there's more interpretation involved."
"That's a very precise way of avoiding my question."
He looked at her. Something shifted slightly in his expression — not displeasure, more like recognition. The recognition of being read accurately by someone you've just met, which is startling even when it's welcome. "No," he said. "The accounting isn't done. But I'm further along than I was at the gallery."
She accepted this. She did not push, not because she was managing his comfort — she checked herself for this, quickly, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts — but because it was the honest answer and she respected it.
They stayed for another hour. The coffee became a second coffee. The conversation moved through architecture and Atlanta and the small, specific comedy of other people's events as witnessed by someone who sets them up — she had stories, a few of which she told, and he listened with the kind of attention that makes storytelling feel worthwhile rather than effortful. He told her about the Decatur house, the elderly couple, the east-facing window for the morning reader. She found herself moved by the detail of it, the way a person can be moved by evidence of care.
She did not say this.
But she thought about it afterward, walking home through the sharp October morning with her hands in her jacket pockets, the conversation replaying at the low volume of something you're listening to for more than just the surface.
He had not tried to impress her. She was not certain most men she'd met since her twenties had understood that impressing a person and interesting them were separate operations, that one was about the impresser and the other was about the audience, and only one of them actually worked.
She was three weeks out of two years of loving someone who had, she now understood, spent a great deal of their time together managing how he appeared to her. Not dishonestly. Not with calculation. Just with the constant low-grade attention to presentation that means a person never fully puts down their luggage, never stops being someone who is on a kind of audition.
Jack had been auditioning. She hadn't known it at the time, but she understood it now — he'd been performing the man she needed rather than becoming him, and the performance was good enough that it had taken eighteen months for the gap between the performance and the person to become visible.
Damien Cole, she thought, walking home, was not performing.
She was careful with this thought. She had known him for ten days and two conversations. She was three weeks out of a relationship and in the early stages of understanding her own patterns. She had a list of eleven items that existed specifically to remind her how much she was capable of seeing what she wanted to see.
She was careful.
But she was also — and she recognized this, checked it against the list, and found it was something different from the list, something that predated the habit — she was genuinely interested. Not in what he might be. In what he actually was.
That distinction, she was beginning to understand, was the whole ballgame.
On the other side of the city, Damien walked from the parking structure into his building and took the elevator to his floor and went into his apartment and stood in the kitchen for a moment doing nothing in particular, which was unusual for him.
He was not someone who stood in kitchens doing nothing. He was someone who moved through spaces with intention, who had a relationship with time that was organized rather than organic, who had cultivated, over thirty-seven years of life and one significant loss, a reliable method for ensuring that the interior noise stayed at a manageable level.
He stood in his kitchen doing nothing for approximately four minutes.
Then he went to his desk and opened the Decatur drawings, and he sat with them for a long time, and he made two small changes to the window specification that he'd been meaning to make for a week and that now resolved immediately, as if they'd been waiting for him to be in the right state of mind to see them.
He thought about what she'd said: I want to understand it before I sit across from him. Otherwise I'll just manage that conversation too.
He thought about the managing — what she'd described as her own pattern. He thought about Celeste, and about a different version of the same pattern, from the other side: what it was like to be with someone who needed, always, to be the one holding things together, whose relational identity was so bound up in the organizing of other people's comfort that there had been no room, finally, in the space between them for him to be uncomfortable. For him to be uncertain. For him to be, simply, the one who didn't know what to do.
He had not known how to be with someone who couldn't let him not know. And he had not said so, which was his own version of the same problem — his own eleven items, if he were writing the list — and they had arrived at the end through the accumulated weight of things neither of them had said, which was perhaps the most common ending of all.
He looked at the window specification.
He thought about an east-facing window and a woman who read in the mornings and would want the light.
He thought that there was something generous about paying that kind of attention — about caring how the light would fall on a specific person's specific morning — and that generosity of that kind, the quiet, unsexy, structural kind, was what he had been missing in his life for longer than four months. Longer than Celeste. Long enough that he had almost convinced himself it wasn't a thing you could actually have, that it existed in the Decatur house for an elderly couple and not in the rooms of his own life.
He closed the drawings.
He opened a new message, typed: It was good to meet you properly. Then he deleted it because it was both true and insufficient and he was not yet sure what the sufficient version was.
He would think about it.
He was, among his other qualities, patient. Buildings had taught him that. You could not rush the moment when a design revealed its own logic. You could work, and attend, and hold the question open — but the answer came in its own time, and arriving early to the answer, like arriving early to everything else, only meant you had to wait.
He was used to waiting.
He was less certain than he'd been this morning that he wanted to.