“Oh, nothing.” He shrugged a little too vaguely for Lara’s liking.

As the conversation went on, he continued to gloss over the details of what had actually happened after the wake. That he’d slept with the widow was a real possibility. As their mac and cheese arrived, Lara had begun to care about this detail—it needled at her—and the vexation surprised her.

Over the hour that followed, Lara found herself noticing things about Ben Archer that she’d never paid attention to in the nine months that she’d known him well. There was a growing energy she felt, like the first flicker in a tinder nest. For the first time, she hadn’t asked him for news on Todd. To her surprise, she was living in this moment. It was so unexpected that it only made the attraction she was feeling more interesting.

Well, that and the wine.

They traded favorite Hitchcock films (hers North by Northwest, his Vertigo), favorite James Bond films (his Dr. No and hers a tie between Diamonds Are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—to which he claimed there could be no tie for a favorite James Bond film, so she hesitantly chose Diamonds). He challenged her to recite the fifty states in alphabetical order (a rare skill she possessed from the song “Fifty Nifty United States”) and wrote out each of them on a napkin, insisting she’d missed one. (She hadn’t.)

As the evening wore on, Lara found that she cared about his answers to these mundane questions. With all these details, she was connecting the dots that formed Ben Archer. Stories he’d told her in passing—usually when she was crying and blubbering on about Todd—came flooding back to her as patchy memories. In her head she tried to reassemble them, because they mattered now. What had he told her about his first girlfriend? Where had he proposed to Marla? As she watched him talk, she strained to recall every detail from seeing Marla earlier today and wondering how she measured up to his rather stunning ex-wife. She racked her brain to remember their every conversation. In the early days, she cared less about his stories and more about how they related to Todd. But tonight, over dinner, their relationship began to shift. And she’d allowed herself this change.

She scanned the room, suddenly self-conscious about what people thought of them.

Hours later, after finishing the macaroni and cheese special, brussels sprouts, and another glass of wine that was definitely giving her a headache, Lara began to gather her purse.

Del presented one bill, and Ben Archer reached for it.

“You don’t have to do that.” Lara reached for the pleather holder with a faded Amex logo to pull it away from him.