He calls her on a Thursday.
"I'm taking tomorrow off," he says, which is not a sentence he has said in four years.
"Okay," she says, carefully.
"I thought we could do something." A pause. "During the day."
There is a beat on her end. He can hear her deciding whether to point out the strangeness of this or to simply accept it.
"What kind of something?" she asks.
"Something that isn't dinner. I don't know what. You suggest."
"I've been wanting to go to the art museum."
"Fine."
"You don't like art museums."
"I didn't say I didn't like them."
"You went very quiet when I said it."
He holds the phone. "I have no specific objection to art museums."
She laughs — a real one, sudden, not the managed kind. He likes the sound of it.
"Ten o'clock," she says. "Main steps."
"I'll be there."
He is there at nine fifty-seven. She arrives at ten-o-two, which she apologizes for, which he tells her is not a problem, which she accepts by not apologizing again.
They go through the museum in the way that people go through museums when they are actually looking — not moving fast, not performing appreciation, just stopping at what stops them. She stops at a Hopper. She looks at it for three minutes without speaking. He stops beside her and looks at it too.
"What do you see?" she asks.
"A person in a room," he says. "The room is their whole world right now. The window suggests there's more world outside but the person isn't looking at it."
"Do you identify with that?"
"Do you always interview people at art museums?"
She looks at him. "I'm not interviewing you."
He looks at the painting. "Yes," he says. "I used to."
They keep walking.
She stops at a Sargent — a portrait, a woman in a dark dress with a complicated expression that is difficult to read as happy or unhappy, just present. He stops at a series of small Wyeth studies that he has no context for and that he likes anyway — the specificity of the detail, the way the mundane subjects are treated with such seriousness that they become extraordinary.
"You like things that are precise," she says.
"I like things that are honest."
She files that. He sees her file it.
They eat lunch in the museum cafe. They walk through the park afterward in the cold. She tells him about a story she is working on — not the one she is not telling him about, but another one, about a community in Kensington and the specific way a neighborhood survives sustained economic abandonment.
He listens. He asks two questions, both of which turn out to be things she has already considered and has a real answer for. She likes that.
When they leave, on the steps, she puts her hands in her pockets and says: "Thank you for today."
"You suggested the museum."
"I know. Thank you anyway."
He does not know, standing there in the November cold at the top of the museum steps, whether what he is about to do is the right thing or the most reckless thing he has done in two years. Both assessments feel accurate. Both feel inadequate.
He does it anyway.
He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair that the wind has put across her face back behind her ear. Very briefly. His hand is there and then it is not.
She is very still.
He takes a step back.
"Next Friday," he says. "Dinner."
"Yes," she says. Her voice is level and something else underneath.
He goes down the steps. He does not look back.
She stands at the top for a moment.
Then she goes down the steps too.