"I also bought a larger tree. For balance."
Celeste's cup paused halfway to her mouth. "Balance."
"June says I should not make Button apologize. I may have made Button apologize anyway by proximity."
Celeste set the cup down. Something in her face closed one shutter, not all of them. "Living trees are not props," she said, and then softened the edge because he had not earned the sharpest version of her yet. "I mean—people forget they keep needing water. Spectacle is easy. Continuity is harder."
"That sounds like it is about more than trees."
"Most true things are about more than the thing," she said. "It is another professional disease. Librarians and metaphors. We should be stopped."
He did not press. She liked him for that, and feared him for it, because people who did not press sometimes waited, and waiting could be more intimate than asking.
They walked after coffee along the avenue where the snow had turned to gray lace at the curb. Celeste told him about story hour and the girl in the blue coat. Gideon told her about a brownstone renovation where the client wanted to remove a staircase that had carried four generations of knees and how he had talked the client into keeping it by showing them the wear marks as a kind of family archive. Celeste thought, against her will, that her mother would have liked him. The thought arrived with a pain so clean she had to look into a shop window until her eyes behaved.
In the glass she saw their reflections: her red hair, his scarf, the space between them still undecided.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I am deciding," she said.
"About what?"
"About how much of the truth fits in a second coffee."
He waited again. Snow melted in his hair. She almost trusted the waiting.