He asked how her drive had been. She told him about the wrong turn, the tiny road, the sheep.
He asked what she was translating these days. She told him about the novel — a French author writing about grief, which was either perfect timing or terrible timing, she hadn't decided.
"What language do you think in?" he asked.
She looked at him. Most people didn't ask questions like that. "It depends," she said. "In the morning, Polish. When I'm nervous, English. When I'm angry, French."
"And right now?"
She considered it genuinely. "I'm not sure," she said. "Something without words."
He was quiet for a moment. Not an uncomfortable quiet — the kind that means someone is actually thinking about what you said.
"I understand that," he said. "I spend a lot of time underwater. There's no language down there. Just pressure and light."
She leaned forward. "Tell me what it's like."
So he did. He told her about the first time he went deep-water diving — how the silence was not like any silence above the surface, how it pressed against you from all sides like a second skin, how colors disappeared one by one the deeper you went. Red first. Then orange. Then yellow. Until everything was blue and then nothing.
"That sounds terrifying," Nora said.
"It is," he said. "That's part of it."
Their food arrived. They ate slowly, trading stories the way people do when they are genuinely curious and not just filling time. He told her about the research station where he had spent four months in Iceland — the darkness, the silence, the strange beauty of it. She told him about the year she lived in Lyon, the terrible apartment, the incredible bread, the way she had cried at a market once because a stranger's dog sat on her foot and it was the kindest thing that had happened to her in weeks.
"Were you lonely there?" he asked.
The question was direct. Not rude — just honest. She appreciated it.
"Yes," she said. "But it was a useful kind of lonely. The kind that teaches you something."
"What did it teach you?"
She thought about it. "That I'm okay with my own company. That I don't need much. That I'm — " she paused. "Actually, maybe still figuring that part out."
He nodded. He didn't try to complete the sentence for her.
Below them, the ocean moved in the darkness, breathing slowly.