The restaurant had no name on the sign outside. Just a painted fish and a string of lights along the roof.
Inside — or really outside, since the whole back wall opened onto a wooden deck above the beach — it was exactly as Ethan described. Wooden tables, no tablecloths, candles not yet lit because the sun was still doing its job.
Nora spotted him before he saw her. He was sitting at the far end of the deck, leaning back in his chair with one arm resting on the railing, looking at the sea. Not at his phone. At the sea. She paused in the doorway for just a moment.
Then he turned.
He stood up the way people do when they mean it — not quickly, not slowly. Just completely. He was taller than his photos suggested, and his smile appeared with the kind of ease that takes years to develop or is simply born that way.
"Nora," he said.
Not a question. Just her name, said simply, like it was something he had been waiting to say out loud.
"Hi," she said. "You're real."
He laughed. "Did you have doubts?"
"Some." She sat down. "I had a whole plan for what to do if you turned out to be deeply disappointing."
"What was the plan?"
"Order the most expensive thing on the menu and leave before dessert."
He nodded slowly, as if this was very reasonable. "And now?"
Nora looked at him — at his grey eyes, the small lines at the corners of them, the way he was fully, unhurriedly present. Like he had nowhere else to be on earth.
"I might stay for dessert," she said.
The sun finished setting while they ordered. A boy of about sixteen came and lit the candles without being asked, moving from table to table with a long match, and the deck became something out of a dream — warm gold light, the ocean below, the stars just beginning their slow arrival overhead.