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“Nothing you need to apologize for.” He said it plainly, closing that door before I could worry it open. Something in my chest eased, because a man who’d spent three weeks being handled and appraised and scored appreciated one person who simply told him he didn’t have to be sorry.

I finished the toast. He read. It was, against all odds, the most comfortable I’d been in weeks.

After a while, I squinted at the book because it was there, and the coffee had given me back enough of myself to be curious. The paperback was thick, battered, and cracked down the spine. It held a title I couldn’t make sense of, all consonants and a name that looked assembled from a Scrabble bag by Ray Charles.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He tilted the book so I could see the cover, which didn’t help, then said, “Turgenev.”

“Bless you.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile, only the rumor of one. “Russian. Eighteen hundreds.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s good.”

“That’s it? It’s good?” I was needling him a little, gently, the way you test a board to see if it’ll take weight. “Man reads a book the size of a cinderblock and all I get is, ‘It’s good’?”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. What’s it about?”

And here’s where I learned something else new about Dante Pierce. His impenetrable wall had a door in it, and the door was exactly one question wide. If you asked the right question, it didn’t swing open so much as showed you it was there the whole time.

“A man,” Dante said, “who loves a woman and doesn’t tell her for so long, and for such good and careful reasons, by the time he’s ready to, the moment’s gone. Someone else has already said it to her.” He turned the book a little in his hands, looking at its cover instead of me. “And he spends the rest of the book being reasonable about it, being fine, telling himself the careful reasons were worth it.”

“Were they?”

Dante was quiet a moment.

“No,” he said. “They never are. That’s the whole book. He knows it, too. He just knew it too late to use it.”

I stared at him. He was still squinting at the cover. There was something on his face I didn’t have a name for, some private weight. I had the fogged, passing sense that I was seeing a piece of a much larger man than the one who stood at my door five nights a week.

He closed the book and looked up. It was gone, his wall smooth again. There was no hint of a door, no seam whatsoever.

“Eat your toast,” he said.

I shoved the last bite into my mouth.

We didn’t talk much after that. I sat in my booth reassembling myself while a man read Russian across from me and made sure, without ever once declaring it, that nobody bothered me. Somewhere in all that, the thought snuck around again, quieter, that whatever I’d been chasing across every purple room and hunting app in Tampa might have been closer and simpler than I’d ever known. I got about that far before my head pulsed again and the thought went wherever the keys-in-the-refrigerator memory had gone.

When I finally stood, steadier, mostly back together, Dante stood, too. He gave me the nod, the same nod he always gave, and took himself and Turgenev back to his end of the bar as though the last twenty minutes had been perfectly ordinary.

Maybe for him they were.

I couldn’t tell.

I carried my plate to the bar, where Benji had been waiting the whole time, watching-not-watching with the held-breath restraint of a man defusing a bomb. He took the plate. He looked at me. He looked back at the booth, then down at Dante, then at me again. Whatever he saw made him sigh, long and soft and content, the sigh of a man watching something go exactly the way he’d hoped.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He turned back to his glasses with a tiny smile. “Nothing at all.”

I glanced down the bar at Dante, bent over his Russians like the last twenty minutes hadn’t happened. I wanted to know what was underneath his mask, whether there was anything underneath it. I wanted to know whether a man that closed off ever let a single thing show, or whether I was standing there inventing a door in a wall that didn’t actually exist.

I couldn’t tell.