Chapter 1: The Dinner
The text from her mother glowed on the screen: Reminder: Dinner with the Josh and Monie. 7:30. Don't be late. Kate’s thumb hovered over the keyboard. She typed I have a migraine, deleted it, then typed I think I’m coming down with something, and deleted that too. The truth, I’d rather chew glass, wasn’t an option.
Fifteen years. A lifetime ago. They’d been kids, really. But the memory of his face, that last day—the confusion hardening into something colder as she fumbled through her rehearsed speech—still had the power to twist something deep in her gut. She’d done what she had to do. It didn’t mean it hadn’t felt like carving out a piece of herself.
“You’re catastrophizing,” she muttered to her reflection, blotting her lipstick. The woman staring back in a navy blue cocktail dress, felt like a costume. Joshua would see right through it. He’d see the anxious girl who’d broken his heart and hate her all over again. She was sure of it.
Across the city, Joshua stood in front of his closet, a knot of pure tension sitting just below his sternum. A dinner. A friendly dinner, his mother had chirped, as if they were reuniting two childhood pets, not two people with a decade and a half of silent history between them.
Kate. The name alone was a tripwire. He’d loved her with the terrifying, absolute fervor of a seventeen-year-old who believed love was a permanent condition. She’d ended it cleanly, surgically. It’s just not right anymore. He’d replayed those words for years, looking for a clue he’d missed. He’d gotten good, eventually, at not thinking about her. Now, he had to sit across a table and make polite conversation about real estate or the weather.
“This is a special occasion, Joshua,” his mother had said, adjusting his collar earlier. “Old friends.”
He’d forced a smile. “Sure, Mom.”
The restaurant was all soft lighting and exposed brick, the hum of conversation a low, civilized drone. Kate spotted them immediately. Her mother, Michelle, waving with too much enthusiasm. Next to her, Monie, beaming. And him.
Joshua.
He was older, obviously. The lanky frame had filled out, broadened across the shoulders. His hair was shorter, the dark waves tamed. He was studying the menu, his jaw tight. He looked like a man braced for an impact.
“Kate, sweetheart, over here!”
She pasted on a smile, the one she used for difficult clients, and wove through the tables. Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs.
“You look beautiful,” Monie said, pulling her into a hug that smelled of gardenias and nostalgia. “So grown up!”
“Hi, Ms. Monie. You look wonderful.”
Then there was no more buffer. Joshua looked up. His eyes, the same dark, liquid brown she remembered, met hers. For a second, there was no guard there. Just a flash of pure, undiluted recognition. It hit her like a physical touch. Then it was gone, shuttered behind a polite, neutral expression.
“Kate,” he said. His voice was deeper. It did things to her.
“Josh. Hi.”
He stood, a gesture of old-fashioned courtesy that felt painfully formal. They didn’t hug. An awkward handwave hovered between them before they both aborted the motion and sat down simultaneously.
“Look at you two!” Michelle gushed. “After all this time. It’s like no time has passed at all.”
Liar, Kate thought, taking a desperate sip of ice tea. All the time in the world had passed.
The mothers carried the conversation, a buoyant raft on a sea of awkwardness. They talked about the restaurant, the neighborhood, mutual acquaintances whose names Kate barely registered. She nodded, smiled, and stole glances at Joshua. He was doing the same, his eyes flicking to her, then away, as if the sight of her was a mild electric shock.
“So, Joshua,” Michelle said, “your mother says you’re the lead distiller at a distillery. That’s so cool!”
“Been there for 8 years,” he said, his voice even. He glanced at Kate.
"Kate is a dental assistant at a pediatric office. She just got her RDA license not too long ago." Michelle said to Monie with a smile. "After her divorce she moved closer to here and decided to go into dental."
Immediately Kate tensed at the word "divorced". Please don't bring it up.
"What happened?" Monie asked, genuinely concerned.
"She found out Mike was having an affair with his coworker." Her mother said angrily.
Kate stiffened. No. No no no. She could feel her anxiety building up. Beneath the table, she tried to discreetly dig for her anxiety meds. As the two women continued their conversation about Kate's failed marriage, she quickly popped her hydroxyzine and took a big gulp of her tea.
The pill was a bitter, chalky hitch in her throat, even washed down with the sweet tea. She focused on swallowing, on the cold glass in her hand, on anything but the pitying looks and the fact that Joshua had just heard the most humiliating synopsis of her adulthood.
“Mom,” Kate finally cut in, her voice tighter than she intended. “C-Can we not?”
Michelle looked chastened, but Monie reached over and patted Kate’s hand. “You’re better off, sweetie. A beautiful girl like you? You’ll find someone who deserves you.”
Joshua hadn’t said a word. He’d just watched her, his expression unreadable. Now he took a slow drink of his whiskey, the ice cubes clinking softly. “Eight years at the distillery,” he said, steering the conversation back with a force that was almost tangible. “We’re expanding into aged ryes. It’s a lot of waiting. A lot of trusting the process.”
He was talking to the table, but it felt aimed at her. A lot of waiting. Trusting the process. Was that a dig? She studied his profile, the familiar curve of his ear, the new, faint line between his brow. He’d grown into his features. He was… handsome. Seriously handsome. The realization was an inconvenience.
“Sounds more patient than I could be,” Kate managed, grabbing the lifeline of a neutral topic. “I’m still in the ‘immediate results’ field. A crying kid, a loose tooth, you fix it or you don’t.”
He finally looked directly at her, and the eye contact was a live wire. “You always were good at fixing things.”
The words hung there, layered with a meaning the mothers wouldn’t catch. She’d fixed them, hadn’t she? By breaking them. She felt a hot flush creep up her neck.
The food arrived, a temporary distraction. They picked at salads, made comments about the dressing. The mothers fell into a reminiscence about a long-ago vacation to Hilton Head, their voices a droning backdrop.
“So,” Joshua said, his voice low, just for her. “Pediatric dentistry. That’s a twist. I remember you wanted to be an artist.’”
He remembered. It sounded sounded naive and silly now. She pushed a crouton around her plate. “Plans change. Life gets… practical.”
“Yeah.” He set his fork down. “It does.”
There was a weight in that syllable. She dared a glance up. He wasn’t looking at her with hatred, or even anger. It was something more complex. A weary curiosity, maybe. As if she were a puzzle he’d put away years ago, only to find a piece had been under the couch the whole time.
“And you?” she asked, needing to turn the spotlight away. “Lead distiller. That’s impressive. I wouldn’t have pictured you in a… a warehouse, I guess.”
“It’s quiet,” he said. “And the smell… it’s honest. Grain, yeast, oak. It is what it is. No pretense.” Again, that pointed delivery. No pretense. Unlike, say, a fancy dinner where everyone pretended the past was just a mildly interesting story.
Michelle’s phone rang, a shrill blast of pop music. She glanced at it. “Oh, it’s your step father, honey. Must have locked himself out again.” She stood, already answering. “Donald, I told you to take the key…”
Monie sighed, gathering her purse. “I should check on Martin. He’s been so forgetful lately too. You two… just catch up. We’ll be right back.”
It was a spectacularly transparent exit. They were alone.
The silence was a physical presence. The clatter from the kitchen, the laughter from another table, it all seemed to recede. Kate took another sip of tea, her hand not quite steady.
“They’re not subtle,” Joshua said, swirling the amber liquid in his glass.
“No.”
He leaned back in his chair, assessing her. The polite mask was gone, replaced by a rawer, more direct scrutiny. “So. A divorce.”
“Yeah.”
“Recently?”
“Finalized six months ago.”
He nodded slowly, as if filing the information away. “And the guy. He was an idiot.”
The statement, so blunt and matter-of-fact, surprised a weak laugh out of her. “Yeah. He was.”
“You okay?” The question was simple, but the intent behind his eyes wasn’t. It wasn’t small talk.
The medication was beginning to blur the sharpest edges of her panic, leaving a dull, accepting ache. “I'm great.” She lied, forcing a smile. Really, she wanted to cry at how pathetic she felt.
It was like he could sense her lie. "So... you still draw?"
"Not really. Sorta list the passion for it... after everything. Now I just work, deadlift and game." She said, looking aside. The last bit probably sounded childish to him.
"Deadlift? That's new. But that's cool." He replied. "Do you play Playstation?" He asked her curiously.
"I have a Playstation, but I do PC gaming mostly. I... actually have a full set up." She said sheepishly. "I've always wanted to get into PC gaming." He said with a small laugh.
Immediately, Kate's eyes lit up. "You should! It's so much fun!"
The enthusiasm in her voice was genuine, startling them both. A real smile touched her lips for the first time all night. “I’ve got a rig that could probably calculate rocket trajectories. It’s overkill for Overwatch, but I like it.”
“Overwatch?” He raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You deadlift and you play pvp?
“After dealing with screaming children and failed marriages, you’d want to terrorize other players, too.” She shrugged, the self-deprecation easier now. “What do you play?”
“Old stuff, mostly. Skyrim. I’ve modded it into something unrecognizable. It’s my winter project.” He took a drink. “And I’m ruthlessly competitive at Call of Duty Zombies.”
The image of him, a broad-shouldered distiller, hunched over a controller was so disarmingly normal it cracked the ice a little more. “Oh?
“Yep.”
They lapsed into another silence, but this one was different. Not empty, but full of the ghosts of a thousand earlier conversations, the easy rhythm they’d once had trying to reassert itself over the scar tissue.
He traced a bead of condensation on his glass. “Why dentistry?”
The question was quieter. He was looking at his hand, not at her, giving her space to answer or deflect. It felt like the first real question of the night.
Kate let out a slow breath. “I lost my passion after... everything. For weeks I didn't know what to do with myself.” She met his eyes then. “I did research and found a course and made the decision to do something with myself.”
He held her gaze, and she could see him understanding what she wasn’t saying. After the chaos of her exit from his life, after the collapse of her marriage, she’d sought order. A life with guardrails.
“And the drawing?” he pressed gently.
“I…” She looked away, toward the restaurant’s window where the city lights smeared into golden streaks. “It felt too big. Too much of myself to put out there. Easier to just… stop.”
He nodded, as if she’d confirmed something. “Yeah.”
Their entrees arrived, a practical interruption. They ate, the conversation shifting to safer, topical ground—a new series they’d both watched, the impossible traffic on the bridge, the merits of sour mash versus pot still. It was surprisingly easy. The years fell away in glimpses, in the way he’d always tear the paper wrapper off his straw, in her habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear when she was thinking.
But the past was a third guest at the table. It was in the careful way they navigated certain topics, the slight stiffening when a song from their senior year played softly overhead. It was in the way his laughter would sometimes cut off a little too quickly, as if he’d remembered who he was laughing with.
As the plates were cleared, Joshua signaled for the check, overriding her half-hearted protest.
“My mother’s ambush, my treat,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. It was a gesture that felt less like courtesy and more like control, a way to define the terms of this strange détente.
They stood outside the restaurant, the night air cool after the stuffy warmth inside. The mothers had texted—conveniently, they’d decided to share a rideshare home. The setup was complete.
“Well,” Kate said, shifting her weight. “That was…”
“Weird,” he supplied.
“Incredibly weird.” She hugged her arms around herself. “But… not the worst?”
A faint, real smile appeared on his face. “No. Not the worst.” He hesitated, hands in his pockets. “Look, I’m parked just around the corner. Can I walk you to your car?”
It was a simple, decent offer. But it felt monumental. A walk of fifty yards, alone in the dark, with all the unsaid things swirling between them.
“Sure,” she said, her voice barely above a murmur.
They walked in step, not touching. The sounds of the city were a distant soundtrack. Her heart was back to its frantic rhythm.
“Kate,” he said, stopping beside a dark, sleek sedan. Not his beat-up Jeep from high school. This was a grown man’s car. “It was nice to see you again.”
“Yeah. You too.”
He unlocked his car. The interior light came on, a warm, brief rectangle in the dark. This was it. A polite goodbye. A return to the separate silences.
He didn’t get in. He turned back, his body blocking the light. Gently he moved to give her a light hug. The gesture took her by surprise and at first she stiffened before gently hugging him back. When they stepped back from each other, she smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Well... I should get going. I have work tomorrow." She said, giving him a small awkward wave. "Be safe on your way home." She added before turning and heading for her own car.
The click of her heels on the pavement was too loud in the quiet night. Each step felt like a retreat. Kate fumbled in her purse for her keys, the metal cold and familiar in her hand. She could feel his eyes on her back, a tangible pressure between her shoulder blades. Don't turn around. Just get in the car.
She heard his car door shut, the solid thunk of German engineering. An engine purred to life. But it didn’t pull away.
Safely inside her own sedan, she gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white in the dashboard’s faint glow. She watched in the rearview mirror as his headlights flared, illuminating the brick wall behind her. They stayed like that for a full thirty seconds—two people sitting alone in separate metal boxes, the space between them charged with fifteen years of static.
Then, with a soft roll of tires, he pulled out and drove past. He didn’t look over. She watched the red taillights disappear around the corner, and a hollow feeling, vast and stupid, opened up inside her chest.
“Idiot,” she whispered to the empty car. What did you expect?
The drive home was a blur of streetlights and shadow. Her apartment was dark, quiet. She tossed her purse on the counter and stood in the middle of the living room, the silence pressing in. The dinner played on a loop in her head—his guarded eyes, the surprising warmth of his laugh when they talked about gaming, the devastating simplicity of you okay?
Her phone buzzed on the counter. A jolt, wild and irrational, shot through her. She snatched it up.
It was her mother. So??? Details please! He’s so handsome now!
Kate typed back, Dinner was fine. Tired. Talk tomorrow. She set the phone down, the brief spark extinguished.
Of course it wasn’t him.
She changed into an oversized tee, washed her face, ritualistically wiping away the makeup and the night. But the feeling wouldn’t scrub off. It was a restlessness, an itch under her skin. And that's when her phone lit up from an unknown number.
Hey, it's Josh. My mom gave me your phone number. It was really nice to see you again. You've definitely changed but also, stayed the same. The septum ring is new. Never expected you to get piercings.
Kate's heart skipped a beat.
I also got tattoos too. And other piercings.
As soon as she sent the message, she felt her face burn. Perhaps she shouldn't have said that. "I'm certainly living up to my username TacticalWhorefare." She muttered.
She muttered, staring at the screen as if it might catch fire. The three dancing dots appeared immediately, then disappeared, then appeared again. Her thumbprint smudged the glass.
Her phone buzzed, not with a text, but with an incoming call. The same unknown number. Her breath hitched. She almost let it go to voicemail, but the impulse to hear his voice, to decode its tone, was too strong.
“Hello?” she said, her voice smaller than she wanted.
“Other piercings.” His voice was a low rumble in her ear, layered with faint amusement and something else—curiosity, maybe. “That’s what you lead with?”
“It seemed relevant to the ‘changed but the same’ thesis,” she said, leaning back against her kitchen counter. The cool quartz bit through her thin t-shirt. “Context.”
“Right.” She could hear the faint hum of his car’s engine in the background. He was still driving. “So, tattoos. What… what are we talking about?”
“Nothing crazy. Two large thigh tattoos- a norse seer holding a baby and a fortune teller holding the lovers tarot card. And a heart lollipop on the upper inside of my right arm.” She closed her eyes, picturing his face trying to compute this. The Kate he knew wore would never have gotten tattoos. “My mother calls them ‘permanent poor decisions.’”
He gave a short, genuine laugh. “Sounds like Michelle. The septum would give her a stroke.”
“It did. Briefly. She’s moved on to passive-aggressive comments about magnet jewelry for job interviews.” Kate found herself smiling, relaxing into the familiar cadence of their old banter, now underscored with this new, charged frequency. “What about you? Any… modifications?”
“A few,” he said. The engine noise faded; he’d probably pulled over or reached his destination. “A drinking crow and a lantern on my side. Used to have a sleeve tattoo and one on my lower stomach but I had them removed."
“Oh wow.” She echoed his word from the restaurant, a tentative poke.
A beat of silence. “Yeah.” His voice softened. “Listen, Kate… about before. The hug. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”
“It wasn’t weird.”
“It was a little weird.”
“Okay,” she conceded. “It was a little weird. But it was also… nice.”
Another pause, thicker this time. She could hear his breath, a soft static on the line. “The weird part is that it was nice,” he admitted, the words quiet, as if spoken more to himself.
The honesty of it disarmed her completely. She slid down the cabinet to sit on the floor, the cool hardwood a shock against her legs. “This is all a little surreal, isn’t it?”
“Understatement.” She heard the creak of a car door, then the sound of a key in a lock. He was home. “So, TacticalWhorefare. That’s your gamer tag?”
Heat flooded her face again. “Oh, God. Forget I said that.”
“No way. It’s genius. It explains the deadlifting, the piercings, the sudden proficiency in headshots.” He was moving around his space now; she heard the clink of a glass, the run of a faucet. “I’m just trying to reconcile it with the one who was incredibly shy but ran around with us guys in the neighborhood like Lord of the Flies.”
“We were a tribe!” The protest was automatic, an old refrain, and it made him laugh again, a richer, fuller sound this time.
He took a sip of something. Water, probably. “So, PC gaming, huh? What’s your rig?”
They talked for an hour. It was easier in the dark, with miles between them, voices connected by a fragile digital thread. They talked about graphics cards and cooling systems, the merits of mechanical keyboards, the profound disappointment of a game with great gameplay but a weak storyline. The conversation spiraled out from there—to terrible movies they’d both suffered through recently, to a podcast about deep-sea exploration he thought she’d like, to the absurd price of avocados.
It was effortless. It was terrifying.
The easy silence returned, but now it was comfortable, loaded with the shared memory of a thousand other comfortable silences. This was the rhythm they’d lost. This was the rhythm that had made leaving him feel like tearing out her own roots.
“I should let you go,” he said, but his voice held no urgency. “You have work.”
“Yeah. Tiny humans with dental anxiety await.”
“Right.” A floorboard creaked. He was pacing. “Kate… would you want to… I don’t know. Something less… parentally orchestrated. Maybe catch a movie and dinner?”
Her heart did a slow, heavy roll in her chest. This was a threshold. It was also a gateway. She thought of the hollow feeling watching his taillights disappear. She thought of the twelve different ways this could go painfully, awkwardly wrong.
She also thought of his laugh, and how badly she wanted to hear it again.
“Yeah,” she said, the word leaving her lips before her anxiety could veto it. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
“Okay.” She could hear the smile in his voice. It did something warm and dangerous to her insides. “I’ll… text you. Figure out potential movies and times.”
“Okay.”
“Goodnight, Kate.”
“Goodnight, Josh.”
The call ended. The silence of her apartment rushed back in, but it felt different now. It felt expectant. She stayed on the floor, phone held loosely in her hand, replaying the conversation. The way he’d said her name. The barley stalk tattoo. The easy shift from past to present.
Her phone buzzed once more. A text from the same number. It was a screenshot of a gaming website, showcasing a high-end pre-built PC. The message underneath read: Asking for a friend. Is this overkill?
She grinned, a real, unfiltered grin that made her face ache. She typed back: For a friend? Definitely overkill. Also, your friend has terrible financial discipline.
His reply was almost instant: My friend is a grown man with a job and no one to answer to. He says mind your business.
Tell your friend he’s a nerd, she sent.
He knows.
Kate pushed herself up from the floor, her body feeling both light and unsteady. She walked to her bedroom, but instead of going to bed, she opened her closet. In the very back, behind a box of winter sweaters, was a flat, portfolio case. She hadn’t opened it in years. The zipper was stiff with disuse.
She pulled it out, dust motes dancing in the lamplight, and laid it on her bed. Her fingers trembled slightly as she unzipped it. Inside were sheets of heavy paper, the edges worn. The first was a charcoal sketch of a sprawling oak tree in the park where they used to study. The next, a detailed pencil drawing of a hand—his hand, she remembered, holding a skateboard, the knuckles slightly scuffed from a fall.
She flipped further, past landscapes and still-lifes, until she found it. A watercolor, faded at the edges. It was him 15 years ago leaning against a chain-link fence, his face turned toward a sunset that wasn’t on the page. She’d captured the exact curve of his smile, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners even then. She’d painted it the week after they’d started dating, from memory.
She’d never shown him.
Kate traced the edge of the paper, the emotional ache a sharp, physical thing. He was right. She had changed. The woman who painted this was a ghost. But maybe, just maybe, the woman she’d become—the one with the septum ring and the tattoos and the PC that could launch rockets—could build a bridge back to something. Not to what they were. To something new, built on the honest, complicated rubble of what they’d lost.
Downstairs, her phone buzzed again on the counter. She didn’t move to get it. She already knew, with a certainty that was as thrilling as it was unnerving, that this was just the beginning. The game was on, and the rules were nowhere to be found.