I want to. She paused. She looked at him again. The feeling that had been hovering at the edge of her consciousness since she read the note, the feeling of something almost recognized, something snagged on a corner of her memory, pressed closer. Have we met before? she said.
Before the company, I mean, outside of work. His expression changed. Not dramatically. It wasn’t a flinch or a sudden pallor. It was subtler than that.
Something in the quality of his attention shifted, like a landscape changing slightly when a cloud passes over the sun. Why do you ask? he said, and his voice was careful in a new way. I don’t know, she said.
You look familiar, or not even that. It’s something else. She shook her head slightly. It’s nothing. Forget I asked.
I don’t think I should, he said. She looked at him. There’s something I should tell you, he said. But I don’t know how to tell you, so I’m just going to say it.
10 years ago, in October, there was a night when it was raining very hard. You were sitting on the curb on Brennan Street, outside a building that used to be a restaurant. You were crying. He paused. I stopped. The room was extremely quiet.
Victoria did not move. She was looking at him with the concentrated, slightly stunned expression of someone who is rearranging a significant amount of furniture inside their mind. Ten years. October. The rain. She knew exactly what night he was talking about. She had never not known what night he was talking about.