The waiter brought the sardines. They were very good. Wes spilled water on the tablecloth reaching for the bread, and Margot laughed, and it was the first time in a long time that she had laughed at him without any armor on it at all.
* * *
On Monday, Margot went to the reception desk at eight-thirty, before the floor filled up, and stood there with her coffee, and did not ask.
Dottie looked at her over her glasses for a long moment. Then she opened the top drawer of the desk, under the phone console, beside the box of other people's reading glasses, and took out a small white-bordered square and handed it across, face down.
Margot turned it over.
It was not a kiss. It had never been a kiss. Two people in a cedar box under a single bulb, a man in a crooked Santa hat and a woman in tinsel antlers, their eyes closed, their noses just touching, their faces lit white and soft by the flash. And between their mouths, the width of a finger, a thin bright sliver of light where the flash had come through, where nothing had happened yet.
"It's the second before," said Dottie. "Which, if you don't mind my saying, is what you two have been for about two years."
Wes came out of the elevator then, early, with two coffees he did not need since she already had one, and stopped beside her, and looked down at the photograph.
"Huh," he said softly. "We really didn't."
"No," said Margot. "We were about to."
They went to Constance Yu's office together at nine and filled out the one-page form, which was, in fact, the dullest form Margot had ever seen. *Nature of relationship:* Wes wrote *Dating, as of Friday,* and then, after a moment, crossed out *Friday* and wrote *very carefully*. Constance read it, signed it, and pushed the bowl of peppermints across the desk, and for the first time in three years, somebody took one. Two people, actually.
Then they went back out to reception, where the Wall of Merry still hung behind Dottie's desk, a little faded, because Dottie had decided in January that a building could use one year-round. The accounting team in their matching sweaters. Fergus's startled owl. Bettina's husband, held hostage by joy. In the center, the first print, the two of them laughing.
Margot took a pushpin from Dottie's cup and pinned the second print right beside it.
"We said we weren't taking a couple's photo," said Wes.
"We didn't," said Margot. "Look at it. That's two people deciding."
She stepped back. Somebody from media walked past on the way to the elevator and glanced at the board, and glanced again, and kept walking, and did not say anything at all, and by lunchtime the floor had more or less forgotten about it, the way floors do, the way they always eventually do, once there's nothing left to guess.
Margot looked at the sliver of light between the two faces for a moment longer. A year and a half ago she'd have called it nothing. It wasn't nothing. It was room. It was the exact width of a choice, still waiting to be made, and they were going to make it slowly, in daylight, with their shoes on the floor, one early arrival at a time.