Chapter 1
It was a Thursday evening on Federal Hill, and porch lights were coming on one by one along the sloping street as the sky darkened outside Ferraro’s. At Table 9 beside the window, Margot Whitaker checked her watch for the fourth time. Her date was twenty minutes late. Maybe there was traffic. Maybe he could not find parking. Or maybe he had simply changed his mind. Two tables away, Walter Puit pretended to study the dessert menu with extraordinary concentration, looking over the top of it every few moments to make certain his foster daughter had not been completely abandoned.
Then the restaurant door opened. A man entered wearing a gray wool coat, exactly as Curtis had described himself. The dining room seemed to quiet for half a beat. Margot did not notice. Relief crossed her face as she stood.
“Hi. You must be Curtis.”
The man stopped. Something passed through his eyes. “I’m sorry, but I’m not—”
Before he could finish, Walter walked quietly past him toward the counter. Without looking directly at the stranger, the old man touched his sleeve and spoke under his breath. “Please don’t let her eat alone tonight.” The stranger watched Walter walk away for longer than necessary, as though he had recognized something. Then he looked at Margot. She was still trying to smile, but disappointment had already reached her eyes. He hesitated for exactly three seconds. Then he pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.
Margot released the breath she had been holding. “I knew you’d come.”
The stranger smiled faintly. “I’m glad someone did.”
The server brought the menus, and Margot realized that her hands were trembling slightly. When she became nervous, she had always responded the same way: she talked. “I should warn you about something.”
The man looked up. “What?”
“When I’m nervous, I tell embarrassing stories about myself. I can’t control it. They just come out.”
He folded his menu and set it down. “Then I suppose I should prepare myself.”
“Too late.”
Within five minutes, he knew that on one Tuesday morning Margot had stood before twenty-three third-graders and called every child by the wrong name because she had accidentally taken the attendance roster from the classroom next door. Not one child corrected her. For twenty minutes, they sat exchanging smiles until a little girl finally raised her hand. “Miss Whitaker, did everyone in our class change their names today?”
The man laughed. Not the polite laugh of a first date, but a real laugh that moved through his shoulders. “What did you do?”
“I told them I was testing who was paying attention. Then I gave the whole class an extra ten minutes of recess to buy their silence.”
“Did it work?”
“None of them have reported me yet. I think it was a fair deal.”
Then Margot told him about a parent-teacher conference the previous spring. She had spent two hours greeting parents at the classroom door before discovering, while putting away the chairs, that she had been wearing two different shoes: one black, one navy blue. “The shoes weren’t even the worst part,” she said. “The worst part was that no parent said anything. Every one of them noticed, and all of them apparently decided to leave me alone.”
“Maybe they respected you.”
Margot paused. “What do you mean?”
“People don’t always stay quiet because they pity someone. Sometimes they stay quiet because they don’t want to embarrass them.” He shrugged. “I could be wrong.”
Margot studied him for another second, then reached for her water. Her sleeve caught the glass. Water spilled across the table directly toward him. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.” She grabbed paper napkins so quickly that she knocked her fork onto the floor. The sharp clang made people at three nearby tables turn. Margot closed her eyes. “How long have I known you now?”
“Nine minutes.”
“And I’ve already caused a natural disaster.”
The stranger simply leaned forward, placed his cloth napkin over the spreading water, and handed her a dry paper napkin. “I’ve seen worse.”
“You have?”
“I once dropped an entire tray of cake at my cousin’s wedding.”
“Dropped it how?”
“Face down on the church floor.”
Margot covered her mouth. “What happened?”
“The elderly woman who lived next door picked it up, brushed it off, and told everyone to keep eating because the cake had only been on the floor for three seconds.”
Margot laughed so hard she had to put down the napkin. “You’re lying.”
“I don’t lie about cake.”
The server returned with a fresh fork and cleaned the table. After he left, Margot noticed something she would not understand until much later: the man across from her had not touched his phone once. It remained facedown beside his elbow. People always checked. They checked while waiting for food, during silences, when they thought the other person was not looking. He did not. He sat with his back toward the wall, his face angled toward the entrance, and every part of his attention rested on Margot.
“You don’t think any of this is funny?”
“What?”
“Me. The whole thing that is me.”
He thought about the question seriously. “I think it’s funny. But I’m not laughing at you.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Laughing at you means standing outside and looking in.” He lifted his water glass. “I’m sitting here.”
Margot did not know how to answer. Two tables away, Walter reached the last page of a dessert menu he had already read four times. This time, he stopped pretending. He simply watched his daughter laugh. Their food arrived. They talked about Margot’s students, the books they loved, autumn in Rhode Island, and the fact that Margot still collected seashells whenever she went to the beach even though she was twenty-seven. At some point, Margot realized she had not checked the clock again. The last time she remembered looking, it was 7:20. Now it was nearly 9:00. She had not noticed the time passing. When the main course arrived, Margot realized something else: she had been talking almost the entire evening without asking him much about himself.
“What do you do?”
“You first.”
“But I asked first.”
“I’m slow to answer.”
She picked up her fork. “All right. I teach third grade. St. Bridget Elementary School. Right at the bottom of the hill.”
“Third grade.” He nodded.
“How old?”
“Eight. Nine.”
“The best age.”
“Why?”
Margot looked surprised. “Because they still believe. First- and second-graders are still so little. By fourth and fifth grade, children start learning to hold things back. They worry about being judged. They stay quiet because it feels safer. Third-graders aren’t there yet. They’re old enough to understand a story but still young enough to believe in it. If you read a really good book to a third-grader, you can watch their whole face change. None of them pretend.” She stopped. “Sorry. I’m talking too much.”
“No.” He set down his knife. “You’re talking about the right thing.”
Margot smiled. “What about you?”
For the first time that evening, the stranger did not answer immediately. “I take care of a few things for my family.”
“What kind of things?”
“The kind nobody wants to hear about over dinner.” He said it lightly enough that Margot assumed he simply disliked discussing work.
“Do you like it?”
“There are parts I like.”
“Which parts?”
He turned his water glass slowly between his fingers. “Being close to the people who’ve been here a long time. The older people on this street. Some of them I’ve known since I was a kid. The street changes. Shops change owners. But they sit in the same places and tell the same stories.” He looked toward the window. “I like that.”
A chair scraped behind Margot. Walter Puit stood beside the table, hands clasped behind his back, wearing the expression of an entirely innocent man. “Excuse me. May I ask you something?”
Margot stared at him. “What?”
“Do you happen to know where they keep the butter?”
“Ask the server.”
“I don’t want to bother them.”
“You’re bothering me.”
“That’s different.” Walter turned toward the stranger. “Is your food all right?”
“Very good, sir.”
“The fish?”
“Yes.”
“I was thinking about ordering the fish.” Walter nodded thoughtfully and remained there for approximately three more seconds, exactly long enough to inspect the stranger properly. Then he walked away.
Margot covered her face. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Him.”
“He seems nice.”
“You don’t understand. He’s going to come back.”
Seven minutes later, Walter returned carrying the dessert menu. This time he did not bother inventing a reason. “Do you see how ridiculous this is?”
“What?”
“They’e arranged the desserts by price instead of alphabetically.”
Margot stared at him. “So?”
“So it’s wrong.” Walter tapped the page. “For forty years, I put books on shelves. There is an order to things, and it isn’t money.”
A passing server stopped. “Sir, dessert menus don’t need to be arranged alphabetically.”
“Everything does.” Walter picked up the menu and returned to his table.
The stranger watched him go. He was not laughing. Something about his expression was the same as when he first entered the restaurant. “Was he a librarian?”
“Yes. At my school. He retired a few years ago.”
“St. Bridget?”
“Yes.”
The stranger nodded. “Does the school still have the old library on the second floor?”
Margot was pushing lemon peel toward the edge of her plate. “Oh, yes. They use it as a reading room now. All the books moved downstairs. The wooden staircase still creaks terribly. Every time I go up, the entire floor knows.”
She never asked why he knew the old library had been on the second floor. Later, she would understand that one question could have changed the next several months. At the time, dessert arrived: apple pie, the dessert Walter had ranked last. It came with two small forks. Margot cut a piece and pushed the plate toward the center. “Go ahead. I can’t finish it.” Then she mentioned Delphine. “Delphine and I used to order one slice and split it every time because we couldn’t afford two. Even later, when we could, we still shared. It just became a habit.”
The name left her mouth before she realized what she had said. She stopped. “Sorry. It’s nothing. Try the crust. I think they baked it too long.”
The man did not touch the pie. He did not ask who Delphine was. He did not offer the usual sympathy. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”
Margot looked up.
“I only need to know one thing.” He pushed the pie back toward her. “Did you eat dinner tonight?”
She stared at him. “We’re eating right now.”
“I know. I’m just making sure.”
Something about the question tightened her throat. For the previous two years, people had repeatedly asked whether she was all right. Margot had learned to answer yes so easily that the word meant nothing. No one had asked whether she had eaten.
May you like
“I have,” she said quietly.
“Good.”
