They sat. The waiter brought bread. Avery tore a piece, studied the crumb with professional judgment, and said, "Overproofed," and Dorian said, "Do you want me to send it back?" and she said, "No, I want to suffer," and something in the air between them loosened.
"I want to try something," she said. "And you can say no."
"Okay."
"Last time, your mother asked me everything. I answered everything. You didn't say a word. I don't know a single real thing about you except the bunk bed scar and the fact that you're bad at being in two places at once." She folded her hands on the table. "So this time I'm asking. And you answer. Truthfully. Even when it makes you look lonely."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took his phone out of his pocket, turned it off, and held it across the table.
"Put it in your bag," he said. "So I can't check."
She did.
"Ask," he said.
So she asked. Where he'd been before Vivian and Gordon. Two foster homes. The second was fine. The first he didn't talk about, and she didn't press. What he remembered about the day he met them. "She brought a bag of grapes. Green ones. She didn't know what kids liked, so she brought fruit. Ellis ate the whole bag and threw up in the caseworker's car. Mom held his head and said, 'Well. Now we've been through something together.'" Why chemistry. "Because things change into other things and you can predict how. And because when I was nine I had a teacher who let me stay in at lunch and do experiments instead of going outside, and outside was where things happened to me."
Why he watched the door.
He was quiet a long time.
"In the first house," he said finally, "I was the one who watched the door. For Ellis. So I'd know who was coming in and what kind of mood they were in, and I could get him out of the way. I was six." He turned his water glass slowly on the tablecloth. "Then we went to Mom and Dad's, and nobody needed watching, and I didn't know what to do with my eyes. Took me years. Then Dad died, and Mom was alone in that house, and I started watching again. I didn't mean to. I just know how. It's the thing I'm best at." He looked up. "It's why I picked this restaurant. It's why I spent our whole first date watching that table instead of you. I'm not making an excuse. I'm telling you what it is."
Avery looked at him across the candlelight. At the scar through his eyebrow. At the hands that had held his mother's shoulders in the parking lot under the sodium lamp.
"Here's my problem," she said. "I spent my whole life with a mother who never looked at me. And then I met a man who looked at his mother so hard he forgot I was at the table."
"I know."
"So I need you to look at the table. If this is going to be anything. I need you in one place."
"I can learn that," he said. "I don't know if I can learn it fast. But I can learn it."
"Muscles can be built," Avery said. "I have it on good authority."
He laughed. "Ellis?"