Definite secrets there. A story. “Like you don’t hear music anymore?”

“Yeah, something like that.” He stabbed his salad. “So how long have you been a forensic scientist?”

Not very subtle, but she’d let him change the subject if he needed to. “Seven years. I got my degree eight years ago, but since I haven’t been working this year I guess I can’t call it being a forensic scientist for eight years.”

“Don’t beat yourself up for taking some time off.”

Easier said than done. “I can’t help it. It makes me feel useless.”

He shrugged. “So be useless for awhile. Who cares? You’re entitled to be useless in your grief for a bit.”

Sara was so shocked by his response that she actually let out a brief laugh. She had expected a pep talk, a variation of the same one she’d heard from friends repeatedly over the past year about how she needed to forge ahead, work through it. No one had ever given her permission to be useless before.

“Who the hell said you had to spend every minute doing something meaningful? You can’t busywork your emotions away.”

God, that was the truth. She had tried to do that for two months after her mother’s death, and had discovered that when she ignored her feelings, they just reared up and bit her in the ass when she was least expecting it. “You’re absolutely right.”

Finishing her wine, she stared at him in wonderment. It was odd, surreal, weird, yet so completely right that she was sitting across from him, at that particular moment. And with one casual sentence, he had banished a year’s worth of guilt she had been carrying around. She had been through something brutal and debilitating, and while some people could brazen their way through, she couldn’t. And that was okay.

“So you’re a writer, a pianist, a photographer, and a philosopher. What other hidden talents do you have? Tell me about yourself.”

Tell me your story, she really wanted to say. Share that pain in your eyes with me. It was a palpable need, the urge to hear his sorrow, to comfort him the way he had her, just by his company. His silent acceptance of her oddities.

“What do you want to hear?”

Everything. “Why the Degas Salad bothers you.”

Gabriel laughed. “It just does. No other painter gets a salad. What makes him so special?”

Sara dropped her fork, suddenly getting it. “You paint too, don’t you?”

“No. Not anymore.”

Of course. Not anymore. “What do you still do?”

“I write true crime books.” He lifted his fork, his smile charming. “And I have dinner with beautiful blond women.”

“One at a time, or in groups?” Sara couldn’t believe those words came out of her mouth. She was flirting. She actually remembered how, and she was enjoying it.

“Always one-on-one. I prefer no distractions.”