Chapter Four***: The Long Way Home

[Pa****]

Marisol always stayed a little after close. The others would laugh, pocket tips, vanish into neon. She lingered—wipe the counter once, then again, stack cups too neatly, let her pulse come down to something she could hear. It wasn’t about going home late. It was about not going home too soon.
She opened the book she carried everywhere and rarely read: a field guide to desert plants. Spines and blooms, survival without apology. She liked the way the entries spoke in facts—height, soil, sun—like a catechism for things that refused to ask permission. Some days the Latin names felt steadier than her own.
He walked in on a night that didn’t need him. The lights were dimmed to help secrets breathe, the espresso hissed like a tamed snake, and still the air shifted—as if the room remembered something it shouldn’t. He carried silence the way other men carry noise. Not as a shield. As a truth.
She noticed the barista’s hands—offering him the cup like a small ceremony—and thought, he leaves. Not because of the suitcase in his posture or the way he looked at the door, but because he looked at everything as if it might be part of his departure.
At her corner table, she didn’t read. She measured. Would this pass like weather or break over her? When his eyes found the book, she tipped the cover just enough. He named what it was without guessing, and something in her sat straighter before she could stop it—back when teachers could lift a spine with only a look.
“How long is ‘a while’?” she heard herself ask after too few words, as if she’d joined a conversation already in progress.
“Three to six months,” he said. “Long enough to matter. Short enough to be honest.”
Honesty. Discipline. Words like mineral water in a desert town. She didn’t flirt. She didn’t perform. She only placed her palm flat on the page to keep from fidgeting and said she sometimes walked the long way home.
He let the moment press until it marked her.
“Then the long way is where I’ll be.”
It landed between them like a key on a bar top—no louder than necessary, impossible to ignore. She felt it low, where *** and want share a border. Not a promise. A direction.
They didn’t exchange numbers. She approved of that. People who ask too quickly tire too quickly. She slid the book under her arm, nodded to him as if they’d agreed on weather, and stepped into the night.
The air was clean in the way only desert air can be—sharp enough to feel like instruction. She crossed the parking lot, past a pot of brittlebush someone had forgotten to water and that had somehow refused to die. She liked it for that stubbornness alone.
Her route west added ten minutes, sometimes fif***. Enough time to turn a thought over and still choose it. Shoes tapped out a metronome on uneven pavement. The city hummed behind her like a story that didn’t need her anymore. She breathed, counted, matched her steps to the counting—small rituals that kept the mind from undoing itself.
Halfway home, a streetlamp ahead flickered twice and went dark. She didn’t break stride. Bulbs die, she told herself. Everything does. Still, a shadow near the boarded storefront across from it lingered a heartbeat too long—just the shape of absence clinging to glass. She cataloged it like a plant entry: position, height, wind. Then she let it go. Not all silences were meant to be trusted. She thought she knew the difference.
At her door she paused with the key between fingers, book pressed to her ribs. She replayed the line—Then the long way is where I’ll be—and felt her spine lift again, unbidden. She did not smile. She allowed herself something rarer: the steadiness that comes when a choice begins to assemble itself.
Inside, she left the light off. The room held its shape around her without asking questions. She set the field guide on the table, thumb marking the page she hadn’t read, and thought of roots that hold in wind, of blooms that open at night to things that can navigate by scent alone.
Tomorrow she would close the shop again. She would walk the long way.
If the desert wanted to test her, it could start with honesty.
And if he was where he said he’d be, she would decide what to do with that truth.

[Ey****]

A.I.