Prologue: One Year From Now

The porch faces east, so the light comes up slow and orange over the roofline of the house across the street, and by the time it reaches the steps it has lost its edges.

The man is out first. He carries two mugs and a small carafe balanced against his forearm, the screen door easing shut behind him with the practiced quiet of a man who has learned which board creaks. He sets one mug on the rail. He keeps the other. He sits.

The woman comes out a few minutes later in his sweatshirt, sleeves pushed to her elbows, hair wrapped in a scarf the color of the coffee going cold in the carafe. She does not say good morning. She picks up the mug from the rail like it was always hers, like it has always been sitting there waiting, and she sits down beside him on the top step.

A dog barks two houses down. Somewhere a sprinkler ticks on and off. A dogwood petal, browned already this late in the season, lets go of its branch and lands on the rail between them. The street is quiet in the particular way mornings get before seven, before the day decides what it wants to be.

She drinks first. She hands the mug back to him without looking, and he drinks from the same place her mouth was. It stopped being a thing that got noticed a long time ago. Now it is a thing that is.

He refills once, from the carafe at his feet, splitting what is left evenly between them, more into her mug than his own. Neither of them calls it generosity.

A bird works at something in the gutter. The paint on the rail is peeling in one corner, and she keeps meaning to sand it down and repaint it, and he keeps meaning to let her, and neither of them has done it, and the peeling paint has become, in its own small way, a fixture of the porch, the way the loose step second from the top has become a fixture, the way the smell of her shampoo on his pillow has become a fixture.

"Cold?" he says finally.

"No." She pulls the sweatshirt sleeve down over her knuckles anyway.

That is the whole conversation. It is enough.

They do not talk about how they got here. They do not narrate it to each other, the way people do in the early months, when every good morning feels like it has to be accounted for, explained, thanked. They have stopped needing to explain the porch to each other. It is simply where they are, most mornings, before the rest of the world gets a claim on either of them.

A year before this morning, if someone had told the man he would wake early on purpose for the quiet before the coffee finished dripping, he would not have believed it. He would have smiled and changed the subject, the way he once changed every subject that asked more of him than he wanted to give.

If someone had told the woman, a year before this morning, that she would hand a man her coffee without a second thought, that she would stop counting the ways he could still leave, she would have asked what happened to make her so foolish.

Neither of them knows the whole story yet, not really, not the parts that came before the porch, not the specific Tuesday it started or the specific fear it had to survive. They only know this: the coffee is good, the light is coming up gold over the roofline, and the person beside them is still there, the way they were there yesterday, the way they will be there tomorrow.

The rest of it, how they got here, is a longer story.

It starts on an ordinary Tuesday, at a small French restaurant in Inman Park, with a man sitting alone at a table for two.