I know you did
9. He was present, warm, and somewhere else entirely.
She was standing past the barrier with her bag still on her shoulder, the way she always stood when she was waiting for something — weight forward, already moving toward the next thing, her eyes going through the crowd with the efficiency of someone paid to read rooms.
She found him before he found her.
He saw her face change when she did. The professional alertness dropping away, something warmer and less composed taking its place. She lifted one hand, a small wave, unnecessary given he was already looking at her.
He smiled.
It was real. He felt it arrive without effort, the genuine warmth of a familiar face after four days of faces that didn’t know him. He moved toward her and she came forward and she hugged him with her whole body the way she did, her bag swinging into his hip, her face against his neck for a moment.
She smelled like her office and her perfume and underneath both of those just herself.
“You look tired,” she said, pulling back to look at him.
“Long flight,” he said.
“One hour,” she said.
“Long hour.”
She laughed and took his hand and they moved through the airport together, her telling him about her week before they’d cleared the arrival hall — a client who’d changed the brief three days before presentation, a colleague who’d taken credit for her deck in front of the regional director, a dinner with her mother that had ended in the particular way dinners with her mother ended.
He listened. Asked the right questions. She was funny about the colleague, sharper than the situation probably warranted, and he laughed in the right places.
They found the restaurant on the third floor. Circular tables, lazy susans, the lunchtime crowd thinning now, a waiter who appeared and disappeared with professional economy.
She picked up both menus and handed one to him.
He looked at it briefly. Set it down.
“You choose,” he said.
She looked at him across the laminated pages.
“You always want the crispy duck,” she said.
“Order the crispy duck then.”
Something moved across her face. Quick. Gone before it fully arrived.
She turned back to the menu.
She ordered well — the duck, a steamed fish, morning glory with garlic, soup to start. She ordered without fussing, knowing what she wanted, pointing at the Chinese characters with the ease of someone who grew up reading them across a dinner table. The waiter nodded and was gone.
The tea arrived. She poured for both of them without thinking.
“So,” she said. “How was it.”
“Good,” he said. “Straightforward.”
“Factories.”
“Factories.”
“Was it terrible?”
He thought about Mr Chen. The fluorescent lights. The woman at the third station whose hands had stopped being movement and become something like breathing. The tea house. The river at the hour when the light went gold.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
She looked at him again. Tilted her head slightly, the way she did when a client said something that didn’t quite add up.
“You seem—” she started.
The soup arrived.
She let it go. Picked up her spoon. Asked about the hotel. He told her it was adequate. She made a face — she had opinions about adequate hotels — and he smiled and she smiled back and the soup was good and the moment passed.
The duck came. She served him first, the way she always did, placing the pieces on his plate with the chopsticks before taking her own. He watched her do it. The small domestic fluency of it. The ease of a person who knows your plate before you do.
He picked up his chopsticks.
She was talking about the apartment. The renovation schedule, the contractor who kept changing his timeline, the tiles she’d finally decided on after three weeks of looking.
“Come and see it this weekend,” she said. “I want your eye on the kitchen layout.”
“Sure,” he said.
She paused.
Just briefly. A half-beat where something else was going to be said and didn’t get said.
She served herself some fish instead.
He ate. The duck was good. Crispy where it should be, the pancake wrapper soft, the sauce exactly what it was supposed to be. He ate with an attention that had nothing to do with hunger, just — presence. The food tasting like food. The tea tasting like tea.
She was watching him.
Not obviously. The way she watched things she was trying to understand without alerting them to the fact of her watching. He knew this look. Had seen it used on clients who said one thing and meant another.
Then something shifted in her eyes.
Another woman.
He saw her think it. Saw the thought arrive and take shape — the trip, the distance, the four days, the not quite here of him. The script assembled itself quickly because it was a legible script, because it had a shape she recognized, because it explained the thing she was feeling without requiring her to understand something she didn’t have a category for yet.
He watched her sit with it.
Watched her test it against what was in front of her.
His face. His hands. The way he’d held her at the barrier. The way he’d laughed at the colleague story. The duck on his plate that she’d served him without asking because she knew.
The thought didn’t hold.
She let it go.
Picked up her tea. Looked at him with something less certain than accusation and more honest than nothing.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just tired.”
She nodded slowly.
She didn’t believe him exactly. But she didn’t not believe him either. There was nothing to point at. Nothing to name. Just this man across the table who had come back from four days away and was present and warm and eating his duck and was also somehow — elsewhere. Not far. Not gone. Just — in a place she couldn’t quite locate.
She filed it.
Topped up his tea.
They finished the meal. She paid before he reached for his wallet, quickly, with the efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be. He walked her to the taxi stand. She had a client dinner at seven, she said. She’d call him later.
She hugged him again at the taxi door. Held on a moment longer than usual.
“I missed you,” she said into his shoulder.
“I know,” he said. “I know you did.”
She pulled back and looked at his face for a moment. Reading it. Finding what was there and what wasn’t.
The taxi door closed.
He stood at the kerb and watched it go.
The airport behind him continued doing what airports do. The evening was coming, the light going flat and grey, the city beginning its shift from one version of itself to the next.
His chest was quiet.
He picked up his bag and walked to the taxi stand and went home.