“Talking down the protestors was impressive. I couldn’t have done it. You saw that—I didn’t do it, I didn’t know what they wanted to hear.”
“Mm-hm,” Tiffani said, but now her smile was teasing rather than tentative. “I’m pretty sure you worked it out by the end, Mr. ‘Let Me Just Show You Where the Photocopier Is.’”
“I learned from the best.”
Their waiter swapped out their salads for their entrees.
Martin was quickly reminded that this place had more to offer than just ambience. He had a dry-aged ribeye with a baked potato with a crisp skin and tender, butter-sweet insides. Tiffani had some sort of tuna steak with little nectarine wedges surrounding it. Martin wasn’t entirely sure he understood how it all came together, but she seemed to be enjoying it.
Actually, if the way her ash-blonde eyelashes half-lowered every time she took a bite was any indication, she was enjoying it immensely.
Martin had never been jealous of a piece of fish before.
Tiffani speared one of the nectarine segments and said, “I know this isn’t good early date conversation, but our circumstances are... unusual.”
She was looking to him for reassurance, so he nodded. Yes. Very unusual.
Special. Miraculous, even.
“You don’t have to tell me right now if it’s too hard to talk about,” Tiffani said, “but I was wondering what your wife was like.”
Martin knew he would answer her, but he hadn’t known exactly what he would say until he opened his mouth.
“It’s good to talk about her, actually.”
He was surprised to find he felt that way. After all those years of grief and loneliness, Lisa’s memory had now become something precious rather than something painful.
“We had a whole life together and then she was gone and... and no one ever asks. I know why, I know it’s just that they don’t want me to have to talk about something so sad. But then I wind up never talking about her at all, since it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring up out of the blue. People don’t always want someone else’s sorrows to come up in casual conversation.”
“But it’s hard when you have them and they’re all you can think about,” Tiffani said quietly.
“Yes. And for a long time, she was all I could think about. She wasn’t just my wife, she was my best friend.”
“What was her name?”
“Lisa. Lisa Annemarie Powell.”
“What a pretty name. Was she—like you? Like you and Theo and Colby?”
“Yes,” Martin said. Handily enough, he could even say exactly how, and no one who overheard them would know what he really meant: “She was a deer.”
Anyone besides Tiffani would have just heard “dear.”
He told Tiffani how he and Lisa had grown up together. Shifter families, no matter what their inner animals were, often formed communities with one another. This was harder to talk about without risking being overheard—the restaurant was quiet, its only sounds the murmurs of conversation and the occasional scrape of a knife and fork across a plate.
; Lacking a better option, he substituted in “coin collectors” for “shifters.” There, now he only sounded ridiculous, not delusional.
He and Lisa had known each other all their lives, since their parents had had the same interest in coin collecting and had wanted their children to grow up knowing other coin collectors so they would feel less alone. They had spent a lot of time running through the woods together, just playing and talking.
Lisa was shy around crowds and her voice tightened up into a squeak whenever she had to talk in school, but with him, out in the woods, she spoke a mile a minute. She wrote poems on little slips of paper and tossed them into the wind, hoping some stranger would rake one up with their leaves and get a kick out of it. He had always wanted to find one himself, but he never had.
She’d had long strawberry-blonde hair as smooth as glass and roughly a thousand freckles. They had made her look like she’d been sprinkled all over with cinnamon.
“But she wasn’t your one true match,” Tiffani said. She sounded skeptical.
But Martin had no problem shaking his head. “No. And I wasn’t hers. We loved each other, but we always knew that.”