Chapter 8: The Right Question

On Tuesday afternoon he texted my real number.

Can I ask you one question? Anywhere you choose. I'll leave it at one.

I looked at it for an hour.

I knew exactly where it had come from, and I hated how much that helped.

I picked the diner on Lorain where my classmates and I used to eat eggs after Property class.

It had cracked red booths and no valet.

Bennett was already there when I arrived at seven, sitting upright in a booth with his suit jacket folded beside him.

A white mug of black coffee sat in front of him.

A second mug, steaming, sat across the table.

"I asked the waitress to make yours the way you take it," he said.

"Black."

"I wrote it on my hand so I wouldn't forget it before you got here."

He turned his palm over.

In blue ink, in his neat engineer's hand, it said BLACK.

I sat down.

For one second I let myself be tired.

"What's your question?" I asked.

Bennett wrapped both hands around his cup.

He didn't look at his phone.

He didn't clear his throat or give a preamble about how sorry he was.

He didn't build the little ramp he used to build before saying anything real.

"What do you do on Tuesday nights?" he said.

It was exactly what Quill had told him to ask, and it hit me anyway.

"I used to go to law school," I said. "Now I go to a diner with my ex-husband."

"Tell me about the law school."

So I did.

He didn't interrupt once.

I told him about the first night, in the back row of Contracts, when everybody was twenty-three and I was twenty-eight.

A professor asked me what consideration meant, and I said, "A reason to be nice."

Bennett laughed, a short surprised sound.

I told him about the semester I wrote my first brief at the kitchen table at two in the morning.

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