“But you weren’t...”
“Disappointed? No. We were happy together. We both thought that our time had just passed us by—that happens sometimes—and that we were really lucky to know each other. We knew that we could love each other enough to make up for all the little imperfections, the little ways in which we wouldn’t necessarily be exactly right for each other. And we did.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was,” Martin said.
This time, when the grief washed through him, he found that he could bear it—and he found that he knew that she would have been happy for him. It was like that knowledge was one last poem from her, suddenly blown into his life.
Lisa wouldn’t have wanted him to spend the rest of his life alone. She would have liked Tiffani.
Thank you, he thought to her, back through the years. That means everything to me.
He didn’t want to make Tiffani ask how Lisa had died, so he said it himself. “She had a heart condition. The kind of thing that always catches up to you sooner or later. That was why we never had kids—she didn’t want to risk passing it on. And then I had my team, and they filled whatever we had of that gap in our lives.”
“More coin collectors,” Tiffani said. She smiled in a way that let him know that they could leave these weightier matters behind if he wanted.
“More coin collectors. And one person who really understands coin collecting without doing it herself—we can’t leave out Gretchen.”
“Does it bother you that I don’t collect coins? That I didn’t even know about it, like Gretchen did?”
“No, of course not. It’s a... niche hobby. Most coin collectors end up with people who don’t collect coins.”
This was starting to sound like some kind of complicated logical problem. If all coin collectors collect coins, but not all coin collectors marry each other...
But for some reason this hit some kind of trip wire in his brain.
Coin collecting. Saving up and preserving history.
Talking about one thing while pretending you were talking about something else, something innocent and normal.
He put down his fork. “Did any of the Historical Society protesters tell you how they’d gotten the idea to come to the courthouse today?”
Tiffani shook her head. “I didn’t even talk to them after they left the courtroom.”
“Just a second. I have an idea I don’t like.”
He took out his cell and dialed Colby.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?” Colby said instead of hello.
“I am on a date,” Martin said, and took a moment to appreciate the way Tiffani smiled when she heard that.
Colby said, “I think you might have forgotten how to date, then. You don’t usually take your phone out halfway through and call someone else. Not that I’m not flattered.”
Martin ignored this. “You talked to some of the Historical Society protesters today, right?”
In a flash, Colby turned all business. “Yeah. I took down all their names and I cross-referenced it with the official membership—they were all on the books, no random one-day volunteers, and all the IDs I saw checked out. They were the real thing.”
“How did they come up with the idea of the flash mob protest?”
“I don’t know,” Colby said after a brief pause. “I didn’t ask. It’s not exactly an original idea, boss. Kind of out-of-date, even. I know they were a little old for that kind of thing, but it’s not like they couldn’t have heard about it.”
“They could have heard about it,” Martin said. “It’s not really the flash mob part that I’m stuck on. It’s the fact that I’ve lived in this city almost all my life and I’ve never heard of the Historical Society doing any other on-the-ground activism besides picketing actual teardown sites. They don’t just show up places and start complaining about people not caring enough about history.”
Tiffani was checking something on her own phone and for a horrible moment Martin was worried that he was boring her, but then she looked up, her eyes alight.
She said, “There’s not an active remodeling or destruction going on right now, either. None of the city’s historic buildings are scheduled to have anything done to them anytime soon.”