Chapter 5
Chapter 5: 5:30 AM
He woke without the alarm.
Five thirty-two by the phone screen, which left him ninety minutes before the taxi and two hours before the gate. He lay still for a moment in the dark, orienting — the Broadview, Toronto, the bridge light that had painted the ceiling all night and was now just the grey beginning of a November morning, no particular colour yet.
Nisha was asleep beside him.
She was on her side, one arm under the pillow, her hair loose across her face and shoulder. She was breathing with the deep evenness of someone who had fallen properly asleep rather than restlessly, and Jamie looked at her for a moment in the grey light and thought, with the specific helplessness of someone who had not been prepared for this and was only now beginning to understand why that was, that this was going to be one of those evenings he didn't put down easily.
He'd had good evenings. He'd had interesting evenings, and long evenings, and evenings that ended in places he hadn't expected. He was a sociable person by nature; he liked people, was good with them. He knew the difference between an evening that worked and an evening that stayed with you.
This one was going to stay.
He moved carefully. The hotel floor was cold under his feet and he made no sound crossing to the bathroom, no sound dressing in the dark with the particular competence of a person who had packed for early flights before. He found his Field Notes notebook on the nightstand.
He stood at the small desk and tried to think about what to write.
Your number would have been the most useful starting place, except that he had her number — they'd typed their numbers into each other's phones at the bar, leaning together on the bar stools, the bartender watching with the expression of someone who had seen this particular exchange a thousand times and found it no less predictable. He'd watched her type his number in, had verified it by squinting at the screen in the bar light: yes, that was right.
He could text her, then. He would text her.
But there was the coffee shop she'd mentioned — King and Parliament, the one she said made the only decent cortado on that side of the city — and he wanted her to know he would be there if she wanted. He'd have forty-five minutes before the taxi. Enough time. If she wanted.
He wrote: Gone to get coffee. King and Parliament — you know the one. Come if you wake up. If not — text me. I want to know how the build goes. I want to know when the game comes out. He paused. He wrote: This was the best wrong table I've ever been seated at. He paused again. — J
He set the note on the nightstand. He looked at his phone — five forty-one — and typed a message: Coffee at King and Parliament. Come if you can. If not, call me.
Sent. The message sat in his drafts folder as delivered.
He picked up his bag. He looked at her once more, in the grey light, the loose hair across her face.
He left.
The note shifted.
He hadn't weighted it and the morning air from the closing door caught it — a soft disruption, barely perceptible, the kind that happened in hotel rooms all the time. The paper slipped from the nightstand surface to the narrow gap between the stand and the headboard, came to rest in the dark there, face up and invisible.
At five forty-three, his text arrived.
Nisha's phone was on silent. She slept through it.
The coffee shop was a ten-minute walk from the hotel in the cold early morning, and Jamie did it with his bag over his shoulder and the particular feeling of a person walking toward something uncertain and choosing to walk toward it anyway.
He ordered a cortado. He took the window table where he could see the street. He put his bag under his chair and his phone on the table and watched the door.
He thought about the dinner. He thought about her saying I'm a very practical person in the tone of someone who had decided this was true and was less sure of it than she used to be. He thought about her telling him about her mother with the care of someone handing him something fragile and trusting him not to drop it. He thought about the ending of Watershed — the woman in the water, standing still in the place, not leaving — and how she'd said it at one in the morning in the dark with the bridge light on the ceiling.
He finished the cortado. He ordered another one.
At six twenty-three, he texted her again: Still here. Twenty minutes before I have to go.
At six thirty-eight, he picked up his bag.
At six forty, he walked out of the coffee shop and turned toward the taxi stand on King Street, and he thought — with the resignation of someone who had hoped for something and was now setting it down — that she had wanted one night, and had it, and that this was probably the version of this story that he got.
He told himself this all the way to Pearson. He told himself it was fine on the plane. He told it to Connor when he landed, who said: "That's extremely sad," in a way that made clear he didn't think that was the whole story.
Jamie said he was pretty sure it was.
Nisha woke at seven forty-one.
The light in the room was full morning by then — grey and diffuse, the bridge visible through the curtains she'd never closed, the city already going about its Friday. She was alone in the bed. She knew it before she was fully awake, in the specific way of someone who had been aware of another person's warmth all night and was aware of its absence now.
She lay still and listened to the room. Nothing. The ordinary sounds of a hotel — the distant hum of an elevator, a door somewhere down the hall — and no sound of the bathroom, no sound of movement.
She sat up.
The room had the particular quality of absence: his bag was gone from the chair, his jacket from the door, the Field Notes notebook from the nightstand. The nightstand itself was bare. The curtains open, the morning in.
She looked at her phone. Two messages — both from Priya, both from the night before, timestamped eleven and eleven forty-five respectively: How's it going???? / Nisha if you don't text me back in the next 30 mins I'm assuming you're either in love or dead
Nothing from Jamie.
She sat with this for a moment. She was a practical person. She took inventory, the way she did with everything — the situation, the components, what they added up to.
He had left. Before she woke. No note.
She thought about the evening — the whole long shape of it, the dinner and the bar and the room and the bridge light and everything he'd said. She thought about this was the best wrong table I've ever been seated at, which he hadn't said out loud but which she'd felt in the whole quality of the night. She thought about I'm not assuming, and I want to know how the build goes.
She thought: he has an early flight. She thought: six forty-five. She thought: people leave early for early flights and sometimes they don't wake people up because that's the kind thing to do.
She checked his number in her phone — she'd saved it last night at the bar, typing it into her contacts in the bar light, squinting slightly. Jamie C (Bright Fault). She looked at it. No outgoing calls. No texts from that number.
She texted: Hi. I woke up. A beat. I hope the flight was okay.
The message sent. She watched it sit there. Delivered.
She got up and dressed and called a car, and she thought, in the car, about the coffee shop on King Street — the one she'd mentioned, the cortado. They'd talked about it specifically, the night before, at the bar: the only decent one on that side of the city, I go every Saturday. She'd said it and he'd said I'll have to try it before I go and she'd said you should and they'd moved on to something else.
I'll have to try it before I go.
The car moved through the Friday morning city. She thought about this. She thought about all of it.
"Actually," she said to the driver, "can you go to King and Parliament instead?"
The coffee shop was warm and smelled of espresso and the early morning sweetness of fresh pastry. Nisha stood in the doorway for a moment, long enough to see: a woman on a laptop, two men in construction gear, a girl doing homework. A window table, empty, with a cortado ring on it from a cup that wasn't there anymore.
She looked at the ring. She looked at the empty table.
She went to the counter and ordered a coffee she didn't particularly want and stood by the window and looked at King Street and thought about the gap between the cortado ring is there and he is not here.
She took out her phone. The text was still sitting there. Delivered, unread.
She sent one more: I went to the coffee shop.
Then she sat down, drank the coffee, and let herself have, very briefly, the specific and inconvenient feeling of a person who had arrived somewhere important twenty minutes after it mattered.
After a while she put money on the table, picked up her bag, and walked home. She did not text again. She told herself this was dignity. She told herself she was a practical person.
She was. She was also angry — not the cold kind, but the honest kind, the kind that meant it had been something — and she filed the anger away in the place where she put things she didn't have time for yet.
By Saturday evening, Jamie's number had gone to voicemail twice. Not his voicemail. A confused woman named Brenda who worked in accounting in Scarborough and had no idea who this was.
Nisha stared at her phone for a long time.
Then she understood.
One digit. That was all it ever was — one digit off, somewhere in the bar light, in the tired certainty of a night that had seemed, for a few hours, like it was going to mean something.
She deleted the contact. She did not try to find another number for him.
She told herself: you barely knew him. You had a nice evening. You don't know his last name. (She did know his last name — Calloway, the hostess had said it, he'd mentioned it — but she did not look it up. That would have meant something she wasn't ready for.)
She opened the Watershed build on her laptop and worked until two in the morning and did not think about the bridge light or the way he'd said something with the full weight of a person who meant it.
She thought about it on Sunday. She stopped thinking about it by the following Thursday.
She thought about it — less and less and then more and more, unpredictably, for years.