POV: Jasmine
I arrived six minutes after the reservation time, which was four minutes earlier than I usually managed, and they were already there.
That was the first thing.
Nora and Leo, at a table for three, with the settled ease of two people who had not just arrived together but had been there long enough to stop performing their separateness.
I registered it in the first sweep — Nora stood to hug me first, Leo a half-step behind her. She moved back into her seat after, her chair angled at a degree that had nothing to do with the sightline to the room and everything to do with the person beside her.
Nora had been choosing restaurant seats for as long as I had known her. I had watched her pick them across a hundred tables in a dozen different cities — always with the door in view, always with the light coming from the left, always with the buffer of noise between herself and the nearest occupied table.
She had never once sat with her chair turned toward a companion. She was not someone who leaned.
I sat down and opened the menu and did not say anything about the chair.
"We ordered wine," Leo said. "I hope that's okay."
"It is deeply okay."
Nora poured, and we settled into the easy machinery of the three of us — conversation that moved without needing to be steered, questions about Aurora and work and whether I had eaten anything today that was not coffee, which was Nora's version of asking if I was taking care of myself without framing it as a concern I would deflect.
I loved her for the indirection. I had been deflecting concern for three days and I was running low on patience for my own defenses.
Before the food came, Nora set her glass down and folded her hands on the table.
"Leo and I want to take Aurora for a night this week."
I looked at her.
"A real evening," she continued. "Not family dinner where you're all in the same apartment anyway. We take her, she stays with me, and you and Liam go out."
She said it brightly, casually, as if she had not just suggested something I had not done in over a year. "A date. Actual reservation, actual table, no one asking for more bread."
I looked at Leo.
He looked back at me with the look of someone who had agreed to a plan and was watching it land, fully committed to seeing it through.
‘When had this become a we.’
"Tomorrow," Nora said. "Leo's driving in early anyway. I already have the evening free."
"Of course you do."
"Jasmine."
"Yes. Okay. Yes." I lifted my wine glass toward them both. "Thank you. Genuinely. Liam will be—" I stopped. "He will be very relieved that someone is forcing us to behave like adults."
Nora smiled. Leo reached over and refilled her water glass without asking, without breaking eye contact with me, without apparently noticing that he had done it. Nora did not notice either.
The glass was simply full now — what happened between two people who had been paying attention to each other long enough that the attention had become reflex.
The recognition arrived slowly, then all at once.
The food came. I ate and I catalogued, because cataloguing was what I did when I was sitting with information I had not yet decided what to do with.
Nora's hand rested on Leo's forearm twice — once when she laughed, once when she was making a point — both times with the unconscious ease of someone who no longer tracked whether touching was appropriate and had simply begun.
They finished each other's sentences. Not old friends completing a thought — two people whose thinking had started to run in parallel grooves.
I excused myself after the main course and went to the bathroom.
On the way back I took the long route — past the bar, curved around the corner of the room where the angles gave me a line of sight to our table without giving them one to me. I stopped.
Leo leaned in. Whatever he said was too low for the room to carry, and Nora's head turned toward him and she laughed — real, unperformed, the laugh she kept for things that actually landed — and then, before whatever social calculator she operated on could issue a correction, she turned and kissed the corner of his mouth.
Brief, reflexive — the kiss of someone who had been doing it long enough that it had stopped feeling like a choice and had become simply the answer to a question the body asked on its own.
She pulled back and Leo was already talking again, neither of them cataloguing what had just happened, both of them inside something that had its own weather by now.
I stood at the bar and watched for a full minute.
Nora. The name moved through me in several directions at once — warm, amused, startled, and underneath all of it the tenderness of watching someone you loved discover something they had deserved for a long time and had not seen coming.
My brother, who had grown into a person I sometimes did not recognise from the boy I had raised, leaning toward a woman who I trusted with every important thing in my life.
I gave myself time to choose my face. Then I walked back to the table, sat down, and picked up my fork.
"So," I said. I let the word sit for a moment. "I took the long way back. Past the bar."
Nora's colour went up immediately — not a blush, she did not blush, but the brightness that appeared on her face when she had been caught doing something she had not yet decided how to present.
Leo set his fork down with the deliberate care of a man who had been found out and was electing not to compound the situation with movement.
I looked at them both. "You have approximately ten seconds to explain yourselves."
Leo opened his mouth.
"Please," Nora said. She was looking at me, not at him, her voice quiet and direct in the way it got when she was being completely honest. "Please do not be angry with him." A pause. "It was me first."