The police had asked her what he ordered.
She'd said she didn't know. Which was true. She'd been watching his hands when he came in, the way they hung at his sides like something he'd forgotten to put down. She'd been watching his face when he sat. She hadn't been watching the counter.
They wrote it down anyway.
Like her not watching meant something. Like everything she hadn't catalogued was a failure of evidence.
She'd answered everything she could answer.
They wrote that down too.
Noé had said text me when you get there in the voice he used when he meant text me every twenty minutes or I'm coming to find you. She'd said she would and she had, twice, even though she was still on the métro the second time. He'd sent back a single emoji, the small one, the one he always used when he didn't have words and was trying anyway.
She'd eaten half of it before she left.
The café.
She stood outside it for exactly as long as she could stand to stand outside it, which was not very long. The light was the same. The window was the same. There was a small scratch on the glass near the lower left corner that she'd never noticed before and now she couldn't stop noticing.
She pushed the door open.
The warmth hit her first. Then the smell, coffee and something baked, and under it something ambient and warm that she had always associated with safety and her own breathing and the feeling of being nowhere anyone expected her to be. This place. Her place. The only room in the city where the square footage of her family didn't reach.
She looked up.
Two people at the corner table. A woman; late twenties, maybe, dark eyes that were doing too much at once, the particular tightness in the jaw that Dani had seen in people who had been running on wrong sleep for too many days. Next to her a man, quieter, sitting with his shoulders slightly forward the way people did when they were trying not to take up space they were taking up anyway.
They both looked at her at the same time.
Something happened in Dani's body. Not thought, not decision. Just her nervous system saying here before her brain finished the sentence.
A drop of sweat tracked down the side of her neck.
She was still standing in the doorway.
She looked at Seb.
He was already looking at her. He had the cloth in his hand and he'd stopped moving, and his face did the thing it sometimes did — not quite a smile, not quite anything — and then he exhaled. Long and even. Like he'd been holding it a while.
She crossed the room.
Elena was the one who said her name. Not a question.
Raul didn't say anything. He was watching her face with the careful attention of someone who had decided in advance not to push, who had made a specific agreement with himself about what he was and wasn't going to do. She appreciated that without being able to say so.
She pulled out the chair across from them and sat down. Her prosthesis made the small sound it sometimes made, metal against the chair leg, and she didn't move to cover it.
Seb appeared beside her. She hadn't heard him come around the counter. He set down the oat milk flat white without asking, without commentary, and was gone again before she had to say thank you.
She wrapped both hands around the cup.
Something crossed Raul's face. She couldn't name it.
Raul made a small sound, barely audible, and didn't follow it with anything.
The café went on around them. Someone ordered at the counter. The machine hissed.
Elena's hands were very still on the table.
Dani thought about it. She thought about the way he'd sat, the stillness of him, the way the afternoon light had come in through the window and he'd turned his face toward it without seeming to notice he was doing it.
She picked up her cup and drank.
They stayed for forty minutes. Raul asked most of the questions, gently, in the particular way of someone who had prepared them in advance and was trying not to make it feel like preparation. Elena listened. Sometimes she asked something sharp and then went quiet again immediately after, like she was filing it somewhere she wasn't going to open in front of anyone.
Dani answered everything she could answer.
At some point Seb brought a glass of water to the table without being asked. He did it between two other things, efficiently, not making it a moment. She looked at him and he looked back, and she thought: he knows too. Not the whole story, probably. But enough. He'd been watching this café be part of her life for months and now it was part of this and he understood, without her having to say anything, that she was still figuring out what that meant.
When they left, they both said thank you in different ways. Raul said it with his voice. Elena said it with the specific way she didn't look away when she shook Dani's hand, which was its own kind of thing.
Dani sat for a while after they were gone.
She put her phone face-down on the table and looked out the window at the city going past, the people and the light and all of it continuing, and she thought about what it meant that this was still her place. That she could still come here. That the scratch on the glass near the lower corner had always been there and she was only now seeing it.
She ordered another flat white.