June asked Eli to meet her on Thursday after her shift.
Bring the short-film programme, she wrote. I’ll bring your book. I want to say goodbye properly. This isn’t another date.
He answered that he understood. She chose the square, where there was room to leave in either direction.
He was sitting on the wide steps when she arrived. No packet of chips. No flowers. He stood with the programme in his hand.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He gave it to her. She gave him the book.
For a few seconds they looked at the things they had carried. June’s programme had a new fold, but her notes were still where she had written them. A strip of plain paper stuck out of Eli’s book, marking the place she had stopped before finishing it the night before.
“Did you read the ending?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He looked up. She could see him wanting to ask.
“I liked it more than you thought I would,” she said.
He smiled, a small, unguarded smile. “Really?”
“It stopped explaining things at the end. I liked that.”
“I thought you’d find it too neat.”
“I did. Then the last page made it a little less neat.”
He opened the book at the strip of paper. “I’d forgotten what she does on the last page.”
“Very poor work. You made a whole invitation out of me hating it.”
“I did.”
June smiled despite herself. She sat on the step. He sat beside her, leaving more room than he would have two weeks ago.
They talked for a little while about the book. Not about who had done what to whom in the café or Ruby’s kitchen, but about a woman who never quite said the thing the reader expected her to say. Eli thought she should have. June thought she had managed without it.
She enjoyed the argument, and for a moment forgot to hold the programme so tightly.
The florist across the square was closing. A woman took the last bucket inside. June remembered the kiss there and the white flowers she had stopped looking at.
Eli turned toward her. “I miss this.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t want to make that your problem.”
She held the programme on her knee. The corner of it lifted in the wind.
“One thing,” she said. “Then I don’t want to ask you questions any more.”
“Okay.”
“Were you pretending when you were with me?”
He looked at her immediately. “No.”
June waited.
“I wanted to see you. I wanted you to stay. I loved being with you. Then every time I could have told you, I thought it would end that, and I didn’t want it to end.”
“You knew what you were risking for me.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t just being frightened.”
“No.”
She looked down at her own handwriting. She believed him about the good afternoons. She could remember the happiness for herself.
“I wanted the answer to be no,” she said. “Not pretending. I wanted that much.”
Eli pressed his hands together around the book.
“It is no.”
“It doesn’t change the rest.”
He looked toward the florist. “I know.”
They sat until somebody coming down the steps asked them to move slightly. June stood. Eli moved his knees aside, then stood too.
“I won’t ask to try again,” he said.
June looked at him. “Don’t contact me. No checking whether I’m all right. No film recommendations.”
“I won’t.”
The wind caught her hair against her cheek. She moved it with the hand he used to hold. For a moment she wanted to touch him.
“Thank you for bringing it,” she said.
“Thank you for the book.”
It was an absurd way to say goodbye to somebody whose warmth she still remembered in her sleep. Neither found a better one.
June turned toward home. She didn’t take the path past the florist. At the corner she stopped to put the programme in her bag, moving slowly because her hands were shaking.
When she looked back, Eli was walking the other way with the book under his arm.
That evening she finished her introduction for Saturday. She sent it to Nina, then saw that she had begun to type a message to Eli telling him she’d done it.
She deleted the message before sending it. She left the phone on the table and opened the film programme instead.