“Guess which hand,” he said.

Her head tilted, the way a bird listens to weather. The hallway outside her apartment held the cool of early evening, the smell of rain baked off brick and the hushed, municipal hum of Boston breathing around them. His mouth was trying to be casual; his shoulders confessed a small, endearing panic. He stood with a bouquet of daisies he pretended were an afterthought and a grin that apologized, in advance, for anything he might get wrong tonight.

“Left,” she said.

He switched hands so fast it practically counted as a magic trick.

“Correct,” he said, delighted at the victory he gave her.

June Whitaker felt the laugh knock against her ribs, surprised she had any laughter left. For months—no, years—her heart had been a room with the lights off. Tonight was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission, not a beginning: meet the guy Melissa swore was good news embodied, test for basic decency, then bail if anything rang false. Nothing dramatic. Nothing costly. Certainly nothing permanent.

She wore a white tee and dark jeans and a pair of sunglasses whose lenses were black mirrors. Her hair was up because she’d talked herself out of caring about impressions one too many times. The folded cane rested in her hand like a prop she still wasn’t sure she had the right to hold. She squeezed the handle once. It clicked softly, a metronome for nerves she wouldn’t name.

“Do I get to ask how you knew?” he asked.

“You can,” she said. “Or you can keep the mystery. Mystery helps with first impressions.”

He laughed—real, low, relieved. “I’m Ethan, by the way. I introduced myself when I texted, but people never believe names until there’s a doorbell.”

“June,” she said, like the month. “Also known to Melissa as a flight risk.”

“Only the best kind,” he said. “The kind that comes back to tell the story.”

She breathed. She remembered to do that. The door was still half-open behind her. She could step back into the cool certainty of her apartment, throw the bolt, text Melissa a neutral (“not a bad guy, but I’m off men for a fiscal quarter”) and return to the safe solitude of lemon tea and late-night copy edits. Or she could step forward and call a truce with the part of her that only knew how to retreat.

The watch on his left wrist made a polite, almost apologetic tick when he moved. Just once. Just enough.

“Left,” she repeated, then, because she was done lying to herself more than anyone else, she lifted both hands. The folded cane was a slim, white line against her palm. She clicked it open once, then closed it for good, and slid it into the deep pocket of her tote as if she were sheathing a small, stubborn sword.

“I need to say something,” she said. “Before we even leave this spot.”

His smile paused, but didn’t falter. “Okay.”

“I’m not blind.” The words were clean and small and honest. “I brought this because… because too many nights like this went badly, and I learned ways to tell quickly whether someone would speak to me or at me. It’s a lousy method. I’m sorry.”

His shoulders lowered a breath. He didn’t look away. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I won’t do tests anymore,” she said. “If I want to know who you are, I’ll ask.”

“Deal,” he said, and the word felt like a hand offered palm-up. “For what it’s worth, I was trying to be cool about it. Which is funny because I’m not cool.”

“No one is,” she said. “We just audition for the role.”

He grinned, visibly grateful for the rope. “And if I had failed the test, would Melissa have had to fight you for the security deposit on my ego?”

“If you had failed,” June said, “I would have told Melissa she still owes me for the time she made me try goat yoga.”

He laughed—a better laugh now, the kind that lived in his eyes. “Fair. Um. Also: can I… see your eye color? Only if you’re okay with that.”

June hesitated, then pinched the bridge of the sunglasses and lowered them. The threshold light caught her irises and set the gray swimming with a trick of green, a storm mellowed by summer. Ethan looked like someone who had stumbled on a sunrise at the wrong time of day and was trying to be polite about it.

“Wow,” he said softly. Then, catching himself, “I mean—hi. Eye contact. Human stuff.”

“You’re doing great,” she said, and even surprised herself with the warmth.

“Do I need to sign a waiver, like legally, so I don’t say something that gets me audited by HR?”

“Only if you start with ‘Your eyes look like—’ and reach for geology metaphors.”

“I was going to say ‘rain in a good movie,’ but I hear the counsel in your voice.”

“Copywriter,” she said. “We’re trained to stop adjectives before they hurt themselves.”

“And I’m a product designer,” he said, raising both hands as if surrendering at the mention of the profession. “Which means I’m duty-bound to ask too many questions and then make something you don’t need, like a doorbell that compliments your posture.”

She smiled in spite of herself. The air around them felt different. Not less electric—just kinder.

He adjusted the daisies, as if they were listening. “June, I know we’re supposed to be walking toward dinner right now, but can I ask one thing here, on this exact square foot of tile? Because later the noise will be louder and the table wobbly and I might forget my nerve.”

She nodded.

“When you said you won’t do tests anymore,” he said, “you were mostly talking to yourself, weren’t you?”

June blinked, surprised by the accuracy of a stranger. He wasn’t prying the way some people pried—like opening a jar with force. He’d simply set the jar on the counter and waited for gravity.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m… I’m good at disappearing before anyone else gets the chance.”

He didn’t rush to reassure her. He did the kinder thing: he received what she gave without trying to fix it. Somewhere deep in the city, a bus exhaled. Somewhere closer, a neighbor’s dog barked once at a leaf and felt it had done its duty as a citizen.

“Then maybe,” he said, “tonight can be as simple as: no tests. No disappearing. We eat something delicious. If you want there to be a second thing after that, there can be a second thing. And if not, then we both go home having survived the world’s least dangerous experiment.”

“Deal,” she said, because the word had already made a home in the air and it felt wrong not to let it in. “Also, dinner’s on me. Consider it restitution for poor methodology.”

“I won’t argue with free food,” he said. “But I will argue that your methodology yielded at least one interesting datapoint: my left wrist squeaks.”

“Your watch ticked when you lifted your hand to your chest,” she said. “Tiny metal against skin. On the left. And your shirt cuff brushed the daisies when you switched. I don’t have a sixth sense. I have ears and a childhood piano teacher who would smack my wrist with a pencil every time I rushed a metronome.”

“A tragic backstory,” he said gravely. “We should eat pasta to process it.”

“Pasta sounds right,” June said.

He stepped back so she could lock her door. She did, listened to the confirming click, and then stood there stupidly for a second with her keys in her hand and a man in front of her who looked like a yes instead of a test. She hadn’t planned for that. She had planned for polite laughter and a story to tell Melissa about trying, about how trying was a verb she kept conjugating with the wrong people.

Melissa had said, for the three hundredth time, “Let me introduce you to someone who speaks human.” June had said she was retired from introductions. Melissa had poured wine, handed over a plate of something roasted and gorgeous, and told a story about a guy she worked with who apologized to a chair after bumping it. “He’s not performative,” Melissa had sworn. “He’s that way when nobody’s looking.”

June had rolled her eyes. “That sounds like a golden retriever in a flannel.”

“Great,” Melissa had said. “You love dogs.”

It would have been tidy, narratively speaking, if the last person who hurt June had done so spectacularly—if there were fireworks in the betrayal, if there were a headline and a lawsuit and a long, performative stage on which she could reenact the villainy. But what emptied her out hadn’t been grand. It had been slow and efficient. It had been the months with Owen—pleasant, easy, apparently honest—until it wasn’t. Until he was smiling at her kitchen island making French toast while also texting someone a sunrise he had pretended to reserve for June. Until he used the words “emotional bandwidth” like a traffic cone he could set in the road and then blame for the jam. Until June tried, with an adult’s patience, to forgive the banal kinds of selfishness and discovered that repetition was simply another word for choice.

After Owen, there were others. The musician who loved her best when she wasn’t in the room. The lawyer who liked her wit because it made his friends laugh, and disliked her independence for the same reason. The man in a very good coat who asked if he could kiss her before using the permission to make a story out of her for a group chat she was never meant to see. None of it was cinematic. All of it was corrosive. She stopped going to the places where people got the idea that you were available for anything but yourself. She wrote good copy and got promoted and ran by the river at dawn because her body deserved a mercy her heart didn’t know how to grant.

When Melissa asked to introduce her to a friend of a friend—someone off-app, someone with no algorithmic trail—June made a show of sighing so heavy it bent furniture. But she said yes, and Melissa texted a number, and June laughed when an unfamiliar name sent a single sentence that read: “Hi, I’m Ethan, and Melissa says I should lead with something embarrassing, but I’m saving my best material for the second date.”

What June didn’t tell anyone—what she barely told herself—was that she hadn’t invented the cane to be cruel. She had borrowed it once from Melissa’s cousin during a charity 5K, when volunteers rotated through the route to test curb cuts and uneven sidewalks for accessibility. The cane had felt like a new language in her hand, a way to touch the world and have it report back honestly. On a night when she tried it in a different context, men had revealed themselves without knowing they were doing it. A bartender had spoken to her like a person instead of an inconvenience. Another date had reached out to take her elbow without asking, steering her like a shopping cart, narrating the world in a voice a full octave slower than the one he used with sighted friends. June learned quickly that the cane made some people kind and made others wear their kindness like a costume. She learned that she was no longer interested in sorting the two. She learned that tests simply prolonged the inevitable: if someone intended to respect you, they would respect you without a prologue.

She had told Melissa she was done with the prop. Melissa had believed her until the afternoon June texted a photo of the cane resting in the corner of her kitchen like a folded apology. “Tonight’s different,” June had rationalized. “Different requires data.”

Now, at her door, with Ethan’s patience sitting in the air like a chair he had pulled out for her to rest in, June felt the heat of the old instinct fade. She had told the truth. It felt like biting into a cold apple and realizing you’d been hungry for hours.

“You ready?” Ethan asked. He wasn’t rushing her, just giving the evening a shape it could grow into.

“I am,” she said, shocking herself by meaning it. “But one more thing.”

“Okay.”

“If we’re doing this with no tests,” she said, “then when I get scared—because I will—I’m going to say I’m scared. And I need you to say thanks for telling me, not ‘don’t be.’ I can’t muscle my feelings into invisibility.”

“Noted,” he said softly, the word written in that careful, designer brain of his like a checkbox they could both see. “And when I get awkward, which will start in three, two, one, I will tell you I’m awkward, and you can agree or disagree, but you’re not allowed to abandon me in the middle of a sentence.”

“Deal,” she said again, because it kept helping.

“And for the record,” he added, “I am not normal around beautiful people. See? Awkward. But honest.”

“You’re not allowed to say that word either,” June said, feeling a tiny lightness bloom where shame usually took root. “You can say ‘interesting’ or ‘statistically improbable.’”

“Statistically improbable June,” he said, trying it on. “Okay. Statistically improbable June, will you come eat something with me that Italians would disown but that North End restaurants make with religious fervor?”

“Yes,” she said, the word making a little bridge out of the tile and onto the evening. “But dinner’s on me.” She tapped her tote where the cane was sleeping. “Restitution.”

“I’ll allow it,” he said. “On one condition.” He lifted both hands again, palms open like a magician proving he had nothing hidden. “I chose the game last time. This time you choose. The restaurant, the route, the music in the car. No disappearing.”

“No disappearing,” she said. “I choose…” She tried the line on her tongue to see if it fit and found, miraculously, that it did. “I choose dinner.”

They stood there one second longer than necessary, as if to take a photograph only they would ever see. Then he stepped aside, and she stepped forward, and together they moved down the hall that smelled like somebody’s laundry and somebody else’s garlic, their footsteps in two separate rhythms learning the outline of a third.

The elevator was slow. The elevator was always slow. June stared at the red LED counting down from six to three with the enthusiasm of a sleepy lifeguard and thought about the times she had watched other numbers. How many days had she gone without answering a text. How many awkward silences she padded with charm because silence had been embargoed in her childhood home. Her mother wasn’t a bad mother. She was a woman who had survived by making herself small in the presence of a father who filled rooms with his moods the way weather fills a state. Her mother made storms skip off like stones by staying quiet and hoping gravity lost interest. From that woman June learned to be agreeable, then efficient, then useful. Which is another way of saying: not a problem. Which is another way of saying: missing.

The elevator arrived and opened with a sigh that could have been human if you were kind to machinery. Ethan held the door, not like a man proving a point but like a person doing a thing it would be weird not to do. June watched his hands as if they were subtitles for a language she wanted to relearn: how to be with someone without translating your worth into currency.

In the mirror, their reflections tried to place themselves beside one another. She did not look like a person rehearsing an exit. He did not look like a person auditioning for hero. One stop down, a neighbor with a laundry basket peered in and said, “I’ll catch the next,” the universal sign for I see your newly minted chemistry and I respect its infancy.

“Big night?” the neighbor sang toward them anyway, because this is a country where strangers run a quick comedy set in every small space.

“Statistically improbable,” Ethan said, deadpan, and June almost choked on her smile.

On the sidewalk, the evening was the color of a handshake: a little formal, a little warm. Ethan’s car was tidy the way some people’s kitchens are tidy—clean not to impress, but because they like the kinds of thoughts that are possible in orderly spaces. He opened the passenger door and stepped back, palms out, no flourish. June slid in and set her tote down like a vote. He rounded to the driver’s side, adjusted nothing, and started the engine like it was a truce with his nerves.

A song came on. Not a romantic one. The kind that belongs to the summer you got your first job that paid you in money instead of the idea of your future. Ethan turned it down. “You can pick,” he said. “Route or music or restaurant. Choose your adventure.”

June chose the bridge across the river because a new city is easier to believe in if you can see water. She chose a playlist called Late Lights because all the songs on it were made for the minute before something good happens. She chose a narrow street in the North End where the pasta wasn’t famous but the bread wanted to marry you.

At a red light, Ethan rested his hands lightly on the wheel and didn’t shift them to the top the way some men do in an unconscious attempt to look competent. He looked competent only in the ways that mattered: noticing pedestrian signals, leaving room for bicycles, checking his blind spot with a concentration that made June see child-Ethan being lectured by a mother who refused to lose him to a lane change. She smiled at the thought. He glanced over, curious. “What?”

“You look like a person who was told to use his turn signal like it was an apology,” she said.

“My mother is a woman of rules,” he admitted. “I broke exactly one of them when I pierced my ear at nineteen and then infected it because I didn’t own rubbing alcohol, so we both learned a lesson.”

The light changed, and the car, and the night, and the day, and the weeks to come. But June didn’t know about the weeks to come yet. She only knew the way the city looked when it forgave itself for being loud. She only knew the click of a watch when a man lifted his heart to see if it would be accepted.

She had told the truth at a door. She had said the sentence that made her afraid of doors in the first place. She was not sorry she had brought the cane; she was sorry she had needed it. And now she had done the only thing a person can do when an instrument is no longer playing the music you want to live inside: she had put it away.

If you had asked her as a child what future she expected, she would have drawn a house with three windows and a tree out front and exactly one cat. She would have put a sun in the corner of the paper like every other child, not because she believed in that corner’s astronomy, but because a corner sun says, “I want light somewhere.” The adult version of that picture—copywriter laptop, rented apartment, lemon tea—was not a compromise. It was a life. It was only missing the sound of someone else in it who knew what to do with silence.

The North End welcomed them with the usual fanfare: men arguing about soccer with their hands, tourists pointing at menus like maps, a smell of garlic that had been simmering since the city learned the word for Thursday. Ethan parked with the careful pride of a person who knew parallel parking was a small arena in which the world judged you. He did fine. June said nothing. She would not make him narrate his competence to earn relief.

They walked. They did not touch. Not because touching was off-limits but because some distances are beautiful while they last. June named, in her head, the places in her body where fear usually set up camp: the shoulders, the belly, the point where spine meets the years you excuse people because you think kindness is the same as patience. And then she noticed the quiet places those fears were leaving open for something else: the hands, the mouth, the space behind her ribs where a laugh had just practiced.

“Left,” she said again, softly to herself, and Ethan, not hearing, asked, “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just choosing.”

He opened the restaurant door and let the warm, noisy light flood them as if it had been rehearsing this exact entrance. Somewhere behind the host stand, a radio cracked, and June thought—not for the first time, not for the last—that there are nights that act like preludes, and there are nights that act like doors, and this had been a door from the moment a man lifted a hand and asked her to guess.

And she had. And she was right. And if she had to guess again—later, soon, perhaps tomorrow—she would pick the same hand, the one that offered her a choice instead of a script.

At the table by the window, the bread arrived the way good bread does: as if it had always been coming, as if your hunger was a fact the world had known since morning. Ethan reached for the plate and then stopped, eyebrows lifted, ceding the first move. June took a piece and tore it open and saw steam rise like something old leaving a room.

“Cheers,” Ethan said, lifting his water. “To… pasta as therapy?”

“To no tests,” June said, touching her glass to his. “And to asking instead.”

He nodded. The city nodded with him. The hallway outside her apartment receded like a stage set being pulled away to reveal a new scene. The cane slept in her bag, unsummoned, unnecessary, a retired instrument applauding from the audience while a new song learned its first brave notes.

They ate. They talked. They discovered that the word “favorite” is both useless and necessary. They learned nothing definitive and everything important. And when the bill came, June reached for it first, fast, the way you reach for a sleeve when the wind does something foolish. Ethan didn’t argue. He let her do the thing she had promised. He let her be a person who paid for dinner because she had said she would and because the sentence I keep my word tastes better than any dessert.

Later, when the night was the hour it chooses to either end or begin, they walked back into air that had cooled enough to make the skin on June’s arms report in. They stood at her door again. Not to repeat themselves. To rhyme. He lifted both hands one more time, grinning like a man who was, finally, a little proud of his own heart.

“Pick,” he said.

She didn’t. She reached for both, briefly, like a person testing a piano to see if it’s in tune. Then she dropped his hands and her own to her sides and smiled. “I already did,” she said.

Which is another way of saying: I choose dinner. I choose this. I choose the door that opens.

And the door did.