After Hours

Meera did not let him past the doorstep.

She stood in the gap with her arms crossed against the evening cold, four nights after the meeting with Edwina, and said, “Why June.”

“Meera—“

“You put my name in a document in June. You’d never met me. You’d read drawings.” The porch light was doing unkind things to both of them. “So say the true reason, or go home. I’m not doing the version where you’re gracious about it.”

Julian looked at the step rather than at her, which she had learned by then was not evasion but the way he assembled a sentence he intended to stand behind.

“Because I read a paragraph you wrote about a load path and thought, for the first time in five years, that I wanted to know the person who’d written it,” he said. “I told myself it was curiosity for as long as…