This isn't weird.

Subtext

Yes.

She said yes.

Well, technically she said, 'My shift ends in twenty minutes.' But Noah was a writer. Noah understood subtext. And the subtext was yes. Sitting alone in his car outside of the Blue Moon Cafe, typewriter hugged to his chest, his body was paralyzed by a vertiginous sensation, like waiting at the highest peak of a roller coaster for the imminent drop, his nervous system yet undecided as to whether it should be signaling carefree elation or terrible, inescapable, unthinkable horror.

She said yes.

Seven years. Seven terrible, inescapable, unthinkable years he'd ached for this opportunity, to see her face, hear her voice, sit across from her, to finally, finally, finally tell her the truth. The terrible, inescapable, unthinkable truth.

She said yes.

It would change nothing, of course. He was sure of that. The damage was done, cemented into their hearts and histories like the calcified ghosts of ancient Pompeiians, catastrophic and unforgivable. Never again would she look into his eyes and smile that exquisite smile. Still, she deserved to know, even if it couldn't earn him a shred of forgiveness.

And then again, he had been equally sure she would say no. But she didn't say no.

She said yes.

Maybe it would change everything.

It had been twenty minutes on the dot. She would be clocking out now, heading to her car, heading here, to him. Noah took a deep breath and squeezed the typewriter just a little bit tighter before gingerly placing it down on the passenger seat. A quick glance in the visor mirror gave him a single second of appreciation for his wife, for having fixed him with her shrewdest stare earlier that morning until he acquiesced to shave his neck and comb his hair (albeit one-handedly), though by the following second, he hated her again. By the next, he forgot her entirely.

Noah left the quiet safety of his car and went inside. The moment he walked through the door, he knew he had made a massive error in judgment by suggesting this as the venue for their coffee date. (Date? Now, that was a woefully inappropriate choice of words.)

Unlike the bookstore, Blue Moon Cafe had hardly changed at all. Time had made its shabby-chic aesthetic just a tiny bit heavier on the shabby, but aside from the inevitable wear and tear on the furniture and the upgrade to LED lightbulbs in the gaudy ersatz Moroccan lanterns, everything was right where he left it. It felt as if he had stepped through a portal in time, back to a life he had all but forgotten, and his foot had landed in quicksand.

Thousands of memories, one on top of the other, crushed together in a viscous slurry and overtook the air. This wasn't the rush of fond nostalgia he was expecting. This was drowning. This hurt. So many moments, so many wondrous, perfect moments looking into the eyes of a wondrous, perfect woman, feeling her wondrous, perfect love, fleeting, finished moments, preserved only in his mind, and disintegrating with each passing day. For each one that flashed through his mind now, surely there were a dozen that were already gone forever, reduced to ash and swept away to make space for new memories, lesser memories, of a lesser life, a life he never wanted.

The memories that found him and the memories he couldn't find hurt in nearly equal measure, they were far from the worst of it. No, what hung heaviest in the air, the most painful of them all, was the memory that never was.

How could he have forgotten?

They were supposed to meet here that night, for an actual date, the first stop in a long night of anniversary celebration. Three years. Three wondrous, perfect years. The best three years of his life. He'd planned that night for months, a romantic tour of all the places in town where they'd shared their happiest memories. Coffee at Blue Moon first, of course, where he would give her the ring. He'd saved up all year to replace the cheap zirconia he'd proposed with on their last anniversary, and though she insisted that she didn't need an expensive ring, he knew that this one would dazzle her beyond her wildest imagination—a massive tear-shaped opal nestled into a row of gleaming peridots, so perfectly her. He would read the new poem he'd written for her, and she would almost definitely cry. There was a not insignificant chance that he would, too.