We walked out into the December cold.
The harbor wind hit us immediately.
Cara tucked her chin into her coat, and I shoved my hands into my pockets as we crossed toward a small place that was still open.
There were no chandeliers inside.
No foundation officials.
No place cards telling us where to sit.
We chose a table ourselves.
That mattered.
Over coffee, we talked about Ben and Jennifer in a way I had never managed with strangers before.
Cara told me Ben had been impossible about breakfast.
He would burn eggs, insist they were “crispy,” then eat them anyway because admitting defeat was apparently against firefighter culture.
I told her Jennifer used to hide my station T-shirts because she said six nearly identical navy shirts did not count as a wardrobe.
Cara smiled.
“She sounds funny.”
“She was.”
The words hurt, but they did not destroy me.
That surprised me.
Cara told me Ben had proposed in their kitchen because every complicated plan he made kept going wrong.
Finally he had gotten frustrated, pulled out the ring while she was unloading groceries, and asked her beside a bag of onions.
“Very romantic,” I said.
“Extremely.
I was holding frozen peas.”
We both laughed.
Then she grew quiet.
“For a long time, I thought laughing about him meant I wasn’t taking what happened seriously.”
I stared into my coffee.
“I know that feeling.”
“Do you?”
“The first time I had a genuinely good day after Jennifer died, I got home and felt guilty about it.”
Cara nodded immediately.
There it was again—that terrible recognition.
She understood before I had to explain.
We stayed until the employee behind the counter started wiping tables around us with increasing determination.
Outside, we stopped on the sidewalk.
“So,” Cara said.
“That was technically the second location of the blind date neither of us agreed to.”
“I think leaving the hotel voided the original arrangement.”
“Good.”
She smiled.
“Then the coffee was our decision.”
“Yes.”
For the first time that night, I understood why that distinction mattered so much.
We exchanged numbers.
Nothing dramatic happened afterward.
There was no sudden transformation.
No moment where grief disappeared because someone new had entered the picture.
The next morning I still woke up alone.
Jennifer’s photograph was still on the shelf beside my books.
Her winter scarf was still in the back of a closet I had never been able to empty completely.
I went to the station, changed into my gear, and found Captain Rodriguez drinking coffee near the apparatus bay.
He looked at me over the rim of the cup.
“How was the gala?”
I stopped walking.
His face was far too neutral.
“You knew.”
“Knew what?”
