Chapter 12: Six Months Later

The pothos was thriving. Jess had attributed this to improved care, but Danny had a theory involving better window placement that he had delivered with such genuine enthusiasm that she had let him move it without argument, and the pothos had responded to the new position with the robust gratitude of a plant that had finally gotten what it needed. Danny had been in Seattle for three months. The logistics had been, as logistics are, both simpler and more complicated than anticipated. He had found a job in two weeks — the Seattle tech sector was smaller than Boston's but not by much. He had not moved into her apartment immediately, partly because she had a system and it took time to integrate two systems without one system eating the other, and partly because they were both people who understood the difference between *this is right* and *let's rush it*. He had his own apartment six blocks away. He spent four nights a week at hers, which had evolved into five without either of them formally deciding it, which was the best kind of evolution. On the six-month anniversary of the Santa Monica parking lot, they went to dinner at a restaurant that was not particularly special — a neighborhood Italian place they'd started going to because it was close and had good pasta — and Jess looked across the table at him and thought about five years and twelve states and a travel app glitch that shouldn't have been possible. "What are you thinking?" he said. "That I'm glad," she said. "About all of it. Even the five years. Because I don't think I'd have known how to be ready for this without them." Danny considered this with the seriousness he brought to her important statements. "I think you might be right," he said. "I was also not ready, five years ago. I thought I was, but I was younger about it." He turned his glass. "I think we had to become the people who could do this before we could do this." "That's very mature of you." "I've been practicing." She laughed. Outside, Seattle was doing what Seattle does in autumn — rain, the good kind, steady and silver, making the city look like a city worth choosing. "I like it here," he said, looking out the window. "Yeah?" She followed his gaze. "It's a good city. It suits us." He looked back at her. "You especially. You've always been a grey-sky person." "I'm a grey-sky person who has inexplicably ended up happy," she said. "Not inexplicably," he said. She reached across the table. He took her hand. The rain came down on Seattle, and neither of them had anywhere else they needed to be.