A guy I recognized as someone I used to work with at FarmHouse called my name from behind the counter and handed me my breakfast sandwich. It was all wrapped up to go, and I had no reason to linger any longer.

I turned back toward October’s table, and for another long, subtext-filled moment we looked at each other without saying anything.

“Well. I guess I should get going.” I hoped she would ask me to stay, but she didn’t. “It was really nice to see you. To talk to you.”

All of a sudden she looked profoundly sad. “You too, Joe.”

“Well,” I said again. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

She nodded. “See you around.”

I had parked under a big, shady oak tree, and when I got back to my truck, it felt like dusk inside the cab. I sat there without turning on the engine, without moving, crippled by a desperate longing. Saudade. Desiderium. There was a lump of regret in my throat, thick and hot like a ball of wax, and a familiar hunger in my belly so gnawing, so dire, it felt as though it were eating me from the inside out.

No, I thought, my breath short and quick. Not again.

I dropped my head back and let out a deep, rage-filled roar.

Fourteen thousand six hundred days.

I wouldn’t make it. Not like this.

I thought about a question I’d asked October back when things were good between us, when I believed we had a future. “If we’d never gotten together, if I hadn’t been willing, I mean, do you think it would have haunted you?”

I remember her looking at me like I was crazy. “Why would it haunt me?” she’d asked. “I said yes to us. What more could I have done than that?”

I got out of the truck and sprinted back to the cafe, stopping outside the entrance to catch my breath before I went in.

She was still there. Not drawing, just sitting with her elbow on the table, her chin in her palm, watching the barista pour hot water in slow, concentric circles over coffee grounds in a filter above a Chemex.

“Hey.”

She turned toward me, her eyes dancing all around my face.

I slid onto the bench beside her and leaned in. Heliotropism. Bending, turning, reaching toward the light.

Fourteen thousand six hundred days, I thought.

“I was just wondering . . .” I said. “Do you want to come with me? To see Colonel Armstrong, I mean. I think you’d like him.”

There was an aura of calm around her now. It radiated like heat on a sidewalk, blurring everything in the background.

She reached over and rested her hand on top of mine, and I could feel the electricity in her fingertips, prickling through my skin, digging down for my truth.