Three weeks after the reunion I’m sitting on a bench in a public garden because I’m not ready to go back to the bus station yet.

  I need another hour in this city. I don’t know why. Just. Not yet.

  A girl sits down next to me.

  She’s maybe a year or two younger. She has a coffee and she looks over at me and says, just directly, no preamble:

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  I look at her.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “You don’t look fine.” She says it without any edge, just matter-of-fact. “You can just say that.”

  Something about the way she says it. The ease of it. Like she grew up in a house where saying I’m not fine was allowed.

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  “I’m not fine,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. “Do you want to talk about it or do you want company that doesn’t talk about it?”

  I almost laugh. “Second one.”

  “Cool.” She drinks her coffee. She looks at the garden.

  We sit like that for a while. It’s surprisingly okay. She doesn’t push. She doesn’t fill the silence with nervous chatter. She just exists next to me, easy and warm, like she has all the time in the world.

  After a while she says: “I’m Lilia.”

  “Elise.”

  “Are you from here?”

  “No. You?”

  “Kind of. My family’s here.” She smiles. “My mom lives nearby actually. I was just visiting her.”

  Her mom.

  “That’s nice,” I say. And I mean it. Even now, even today, I mean it.

  We talk a little after that. Small things. She’s warm the way some people just are, like it costs her nothing. She asks questions and actually listens to the answers. I find myself relaxing in a way I haven’t in weeks.

  Before I leave we exchange numbers.

  On the bus home I think about her. There’s something I can’t place. A quality. The way she listened. The way she asked are you okay like she actually wanted to know.

  Something familiar about her.

  I press at it and it slips. I put it away.

  I text her when I get home. Something small, nothing much.

  She texts back immediately.

  I smile at my phone.

  When’s the last time I did that.

  I don’t know. But I’m doing it now.