"Heels break."
"Yours especially," he said, not unkindly. "Philadelphia, the foundation gala. Boston, your cousin's thing. That fundraiser in the garden with the gravel paths. You have a statistical relationship with cobblestones."
"Which is why the spare is essential."
He watched her face the way he watched city plans when a line on the page did not match the street. Felix worked in municipal planning—zoning language, public hearings, the unglamorous poetry of sidewalk widths—and he had never lost the habit of looking for what a design was trying not to admit. "And the maroon pair? The one I found first. Those aren't yours. Or they weren't."
Sloane's throat tightened around cinnamon and steam. "They were my mother's."
Felix's expression changed—not pity, which she hated, but the careful stillness he used when she talked about Eloise, born Eloise Hart, dead four winters now. Eloise had worn maroon heels to every speech she ever gave as a school board president and had told Sloane that courage could be borrowed from footwear if nowhere else. Sloane wrote speeches for a living now, donor dinners and nonprofit galas, and she was to give the maid-of-honor toast at Audra's wedding. She had packed the maroon pair the way some people packed rosaries, or photographs, or the phone number of a friend who answered at two in the morning.
"You didn't tell me you were bringing them," Felix said.
"I didn't tell you a lot of things this week."
The honesty landed between them harder than she intended. Maribel's espresso machine hissed. The older woman in plum turned a page and did not look up, which somehow made Sloane feel more seen rather than less.
Felix set his cup down on the ledge. A ring of heat fogged the marble. "The thermos."
"Felix."
"You looked caught. Not surprised like you'd forgotten a water bottle. Caught. I've seen you forget umbrellas, chargers, once an entire presentation clicker. That face wasn't forgetting."
Sloane stared at the departure boards until the letters blurred into soft gold rectangles. North Springs, delayed. Snow. An hour that had already begun to feel like a room with only one door and too many coats hung on the back of it.