Page 42 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

I look at the book rather than his face. “Do you still talk?”

“Sometimes.” He closes the cover and rises, holding the book at his side. “We know how to reach each other.”

We move through two more aisles before making our way downstairs. I add a used essay collection to the Marlowe edition, then put back a third book after carrying it halfway to the register. Dash sees me return it and keeps walking, his green hardcover in one hand and both coats over his arm.

At the counter, I pay for mine before he can reach for anything. Dash pays for his, and the cashier puts the books together in one paper bag when he sees us standing side by side.

The coffee counter is near the back window, half-hidden behind a shelf of staff picks and a display of notebooks from the stationery shop next door. Dash looks toward it while he gathers the bag.

“Do you have time for coffee?”

I glance at the front windows. The sky outside has gone dark while we were upstairs, and streetlights reflect in the wet pavement.

“I have time.”

We take a table near the window after ordering. Dash gets black coffee, and I get a vanilla latte with a slice of lemon cake because Mara will ask, and I’d rather have an honest answer ready when she does.

The books sit in the bag between my feet. Dash takes off his glasses to wipe them with a cloth from his pocket, and the faint mark they leave on the bridge of his nose makes him look more tired than he did in the classroom doorway.

“How many meetings did you have today?” I ask, cutting into the cake with the side of my fork.

“Three before noon.” He puts his glasses back on and reaches for his cup. “The last one involved two departments, one lecture hall, and a facilities manager who looked like he’d been taken hostage.”

“Who got the room?”

“Chemistry. They’d already moved equipment.”

“That sounds fair.”

“It was. Fairness didn’t stop anyone from discussing it for forty minutes.”

I take a bite of cake and listen while he tells me enough about the meeting to make the room assignment sound like a moral crisis nobody meant to create. He doesn’t make the story big. He only gives me the pieces, dry and precise, and lets me see the absurdity without pushing me toward it.

When he finishes, I tell him about the first class I ever taught on my own. I had written twelve pages of notes and finished all of them in twenty-five minutes because I was terrified of silence and hadn’t yet learned that students sometimes need time to think before they can answer. Dash listens with both hands around his coffee, his shoulders angled toward me while the shop moves around us.

“My first class ended early too,” he says after I tell him about fleeing to the faculty bathroom afterward to breathe. “I talked so fast one student asked if I was late for something.”

“You?”

“I was younger.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

His eyes warm behind his glasses. “No.”

I smile into my latte and look toward the window before I make too much of how easily the smile came.

Outside, people pass in coats and scarves, some carrying takeout bags from the restaurant next door. Inside, the barista wipes down the counter between customers, and someone turns a page at the table behind Dash with a slow rasp of paper.

He reaches down for the bookstore bag and pulls out the green hardcover. “This is the essay.”

He opens to the table of contents and turns the book so I can see where his finger rests beside the title. The name means nothing to me, though there is a faint pencil check beside it from whoever owned the book before him.

“What did your brother argue?”

“That I was trying to make duty sound more complicated than it needed to be.” Dash turns the book back toward himself. “He thought people knew what mattered and only built theories afterward to justify what they wanted.”

“And you disagreed?”