The sign goes off at 9.

He wipes his hands on the rag — twice, the way he always does, left to right, folded in thirds — and hangs it on the hook by the bay door and doesn't examine why he bothered washing up properly tonight when the grease never fully leaves anyway.

The garage locks behind him.

The diner across the road is lit up gold through the rain. He can see the shape of it from here — the last of the dinner crowd thinning out, the counter stools emptying one by one, the particular winding-down of a place approaching its own version of quiet. He knows the rhythms of it now. Knows the difference between the 8 o'clock rush and the 9 o'clock settling. Knows which cars in the lot belong to regulars and which belong to truckers passing through who won't be back.

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He knows her shift ends at nine-thirty.

He crosses the road.

The bell above the diner door does its thing. Warm air. Coffee smell. The tail end of a busy night written in the stacked plates at the pass-through and the tired set of every shoulder behind the counter. Someone has spilled something near the register and cleaned it imperfectly. The neon sign outside throws its broken light through the window in a way that has been bothering him for weeks.

Booth six is empty.

He sits.

Back to the wall.

He doesn't order. Doesn't need to. His coffee arrives the way it always arrives — before he's settled, before he's asked, set down by a hand he'd know in a blackout and poured to exactly the level she knows he drinks it to, which is a thing he never told her and she simply noticed and filed away and acted on without comment.

He wraps both hands around the cup.

The diner is winding down around him. Chairs going up on tables at the far end. The cook calling something through the pass-through. A couple near the window pulling on their coats.

She moves through all of it the way she always moves — efficient, unhurried, the particular grace of someone who has done this long enough that the work has stopped requiring all of her attention, which means he catches the rest of it sometimes.

Sometimes she aims it at him.

He looks down at the coffee.

He is thirty-seven years old. He has slept badly for years. He has kept people at a careful and functional distance for longer than that. He has built a life that makes sense — the garage, the order, the solitude that costs him less than proximity used to.

He comes here on nights that aren't Thursday now.

He has not addressed this directly.

The last table near the window pays and leaves. The bell above the door. The rush officially over. The diner exhales.

She leans against the counter.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough for him to see it — the specific exhaustion of the end of a long shift, the way she lets her weight settle differently when she thinks no one is timing her recovery.

He is timing nothing.

He is looking at his coffee.

He is aware of her the way he is aware of exits and he has made his peace with this and is drinking his coffee.

She pushes off the counter.

She picks up the pot.

She comes to booth six.

"Thomas."

He looks up.

She refills the cup that doesn't need refilling and doesn't say anything else and he doesn't say anything else and the diner settles into its almost-closed quiet around them and he sits with his back to the wall and his hands around the cup and thinks about the garage sign outside that he locked up tonight and the diner sign outside that he has been meaning to fix and thinks —

He should fix the sign.

He should come back tomorrow.

He wraps his hands around the coffee.

He stays.