He came home at six.
The apartment had the specific warmth of a place that had recently been full of good energy and hadn't lost it yet — Raul on the couch with his feet up, Elena cross-legged on the floor with her sketchbook, the particular easy quiet of people who had had a good day and were still inside it. Someone had made tea. The good kind, the kind Raul only made when he was in a specific mood.
"How was the stream?" the Fighter said, dropping his jacket on the hook.
"Good," Elena said, without looking up. "Priya's great. I think I said something quotable about anger."
"She always does," Raul said.
"I always do," Elena agreed.
The Fighter got a glass of water and came and sat in the armchair and drank it. Raul was watching something on his phone with the sound off. Elena's pencil moved.
Normal. Good normal. The kind of normal that had felt very far away three weeks ago and was now, tentatively, back.
The Fighter set his glass down.
"She was so fucking cute," he said.
Raul looked up from his phone. Elena's pencil stopped mid-stroke.
The Fighter looked at his glass. Then at the ceiling. Then back at the glass.
"I met someone," he said, in a completely different register. "At a café. She sat down at my table because she needed the extra chair for her crutches and we ended up talking for — a while."
"A while," Raul said.
"Three hours approximately."
Elena had put her sketchbook down. She was looking at him with the expression she reserved for things she needed to examine from multiple angles.
"You talked to someone for three hours."
"Yes."
"You."
"Yes, Elena."
"In a café."
"That is where it happened, yes."
She exchanged a look with Raul that the Fighter clocked and chose to ignore.
"What's her name," Elena said.
"Dani."
"Dani," Raul repeated, like he was filing it.
The Fighter paused. He was doing the thing where he was being calm and the calmness was doing nothing to disguise the fact that he had been thinking about this since he left the café. Elena could see it. Raul could see it. Probably everyone could see it except him.
"She's—" He paused. "She's an artist. Fashion. She's applying to schools — Central Saint Martins, Parsons, the Art Institute. She has a deadline coming up and she keeps rewriting her statement because she can't figure out how much of the true answer is allowed to be the answer."
Silence.
"Those are very specific details," Raul said.
"She talked a lot."
"And you remember all of it."
"I have a good memory."
Elena picked her sketchbook back up, which meant she was trying not to smile.
"What does she look like."
"That's not—"
"I'm asking."
The Fighter looked at the ceiling briefly.
"She has — her jacket was too light for the weather. She had her bag crossbody. She laughs—" He stopped.
"She laughs," Elena said encouragingly.
"She laughs before she's finished deciding if something is funny. Like it just — comes out." He said it matter-of-factly, like he was describing a technique. "And she talks about coffee like it's a serious subject. She knew what the grind was supposed to sound like."
Raul looked at Elena. Elena looked at Raul.
"Okay," Raul said.
"What."
"Nothing."
"Raul."
"I said nothing." Raul put his phone down properly now, giving this his full attention. "She uses crutches — is she okay?"
"She lost her leg above the knee. Car accident, fourteen months ago. The insurance—" The Fighter's voice went flat in the specific way it went flat when something made him angry and he was managing it. "They deemed the prosthesis not medically necessary."
"They what," Elena said.
"Not medically necessary. For an above-the-knee amputation."
"That's—"
"Yes."
"That's actually insane—"
"Yes. And the family is in debt from the rehabilitation and there's money disappearing from their accounts that she can't account for and she's trying to apply to three fashion schools in the middle of all of it." He said it like he was reading from a file, which meant he'd been thinking about it in exactly that level of detail since he left her. "She has a brother. Emil. Content creator. She's the third of seven kids."
Elena looked up.
"Emil. As in Emil Seddiki. The Phantom guy."
"Yes," the Fighter said.
"You knew that."
"She showed me a photo. At the café. She mistook me for him — from the front — and then showed me his picture to prove it." He paused. "I recognised him."
Elena stared at him.
"And you just — sat there. For three hours. Knowing she was his sister."
"She didn't bring him up much. It wasn't—" He stopped. "It wasn't about that."
"But you knew."
"Yes."
Raul and Elena looked at each other.
Elena set her pencil down completely.
"You got her number, right."
"I—" A pause. "No."
"You talked to her for three hours and you didn't get her number."
"It didn't come up."
"How does it not come up—"
"It just didn't, Elena—"
"Did you at least tell her your last name? Does she know who you are? Can she find you?"
The Fighter looked at his water glass.
"She knows my first name," he said.
Elena pressed both hands over her face. Raul made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one.
"Okay," Elena said, from behind her hands. "Okay. That's fine. It's fine. Chicago is not that big. She uses crutches, she's applying to fashion school, her brother is a content creator named Emil—"
"You're not going to find her—"
"I'm not going to find her, I'm just saying it's not impossible—"
"Elena."
"I'm just saying!"
"She'll come back," Raul said simply. He said it the way he said things he was fairly sure about, without making a thing of it. "If it was three hours, she'll come back."
The Fighter said nothing. He picked up his water glass and drank the rest of it and set it down and looked at nothing in particular.
"She said the coffee was good," he said finally. "She said she'd been trying to find a place that knew what it was doing with the machine."
"So she'll go back to the café," Raul said.
"Probably."
"So go back to the café."
The Fighter looked at him.
"That's it," Raul said. "That's the whole plan. Go back to the café."
Elena had lowered her hands and was looking at her brother with an expression that was warm and a little careful, the way she looked at things she didn't want to break by handling them wrong.
"Was it a good afternoon?" she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Something settled in his face — not quite a smile, but the territory adjacent to one.
"Yeah," he said. "It was a good afternoon."
Elena picked her sketchbook back up. Raul went back to his phone. The apartment held its good quiet around all three of them, the tea going slightly cold on the counter, the city doing its evening thing outside the windows.
The Fighter sat in the armchair and said nothing else and thought about a laugh that came out before it had decided whether something was funny, and a jacket too light for the weather, and the sound a coffee machine was supposed to make.
✻ ✻ ✻
Good afternoons don't announce themselves. They just arrive, and stay, and you don't know until later that you were in one.
> Chapter complete. The café is waiting. Continue to next chapter? [Y/N]