She pressed the lid of the box down very firmly.

"What about you," she said. "Still at the same company?"

"Going freelance in September," he said. "Saved enough. Taking the jump."

"Scary," she said.

"Yes," he said simply. No performance about it. Just honest.

She looked at him. At his profile in the evening light — jaw, dark eyes on the city, the glass in his hand. She had a photograph of him in her memory from when she was seventeen — Jake's birthday, the garden, Ace laughing at something — and she had filed it and forgotten it and remembered it at specific inconvenient moments for three years.

He...