She recognized Mira from across the produce section, which was worse than not recognizing her at all. From a distance, the recognition was pure — the way Mira carried a basket, one arm through the handles and the other hand resting on top as if steadying something fragile. That hadn't changed. Up close there would be differences, and the differences would require accounting for, and the accounting would become the conversation.
"Shay?"
Too late. Mira had seen her seeing.
"Oh my god. Mira."
They did the thing. The hug, the arms-length appraisal, the disbelieving head-shake that was already slightly performed because they'd both had ten years to practice being surprised by time.
"You look amazing," Mira said, which was generous and true the way a weather forecast is true — accurate enough for planning, too coarse for navigation.
"So do you. Are you — do you live around here?"
"Three years now. We moved from Portland after Jesse started school. You?"
"Still on Elm. The house with the blue door, remember?"
"The blue door. God. Is Martin —"
"We're good. He's good."
They stood among the avocados. A man reached between them for a bag of limes and didn't apologize, which felt like a kindness — a small assertion that their reunion was not, in fact, the center of anything.
"Do you want to get coffee?" Mira asked.
The coffee shop was a block away, the kind with exposed brick and menu items that used the word origin. They ordered and sat by the window. Mira wrapped both hands around her cup, a gesture Shay remembered from college — from the apartment on Birch Street with the radiator that only worked on one side, where they'd sit at the kitchen table with their coats on and talk until the sentences stopped being about anything and started being about the fact of talking.
That was the thing she couldn't find a sentence for now. Not any specific memory. The quality of the time itself — how it had been time spent before either of them knew what they would become. Before Mira's second marriage, before Shay's miscarriage and the months after that she still couldn't describe without using words that felt borrowed. Before the drift that wasn't a fight, wasn't a falling out, wasn't anything that could be resolved because it had never been a problem. Just: life moving in directions that didn't share a hallway.
"I think about you," Mira said. "Not in a — I mean, I'll be driving somewhere and a song comes on, and it's not even one of our songs, but it has the feeling of one of our songs, and I think: Shay would know what I mean."
"I would," Shay said. And she would. That was the cruelest precision of it — she would know exactly what Mira meant, could probably name the specific quality of late-afternoon light in a car that makes certain melodies land differently, and that knowing was useless because it required context that no longer existed. It was fluency in a dead language.
Mira told her about Jesse. Seven now. Loved bugs. Not as a phase — as a vocation. Had a field notebook.
Shay told her about the garden. How she'd torn out the lawn three years ago and planted native prairie, and how the neighbors had complained until June when the monarchs came and then they pretended they'd supported it all along.
These were the right stories to tell. Curated, warm, shaped for consumption by someone who cared but didn't have the daily context to process anything rawer. Shay could feel herself selecting them, and she could feel Mira selecting hers, and she could feel both of them feeling the other's selection, and the whole thing was like watching a play through a window — the actors' mouths moving, the gestures legible, the sound not quite reaching.
"I'm sorry we lost touch," Mira said.
"Me too."
"I don't even know when it happened. Was it the move, or —"
"It was before the move." Shay said it without planning to, and the honesty sat between them like a piece of furniture neither had ordered.
Mira nodded. "It was before the move."
A silence. The good kind or the bad kind — Shay couldn't tell. Maybe both. Maybe the distinction was one of those useful simplicities that falls apart under attention.
"I keep thinking there's something I should say," Mira said. "Something that acknowledges — I don't know. The weight of it? But everything I think of sounds like a greeting card."
"That's because greeting cards exist to hold exactly this shape. They're pre-carved for this."
Mira laughed. "God. That's exactly right. We're sitting in a Hallmark template."
"'For the friend I haven't seen in years. May this coffee be adequate and this conversation slightly less than we both deserve.'"
They laughed. It was good. For about four seconds, it was the kitchen on Birch Street and the broken radiator and the coats and the talking that was just about talking.
Then it settled back.
Mira's coffee was cold. She hadn't noticed or she had and was choosing not to mention it. Shay's was two-thirds full. She'd been sipping at a pace calibrated to extend the meeting without appearing to, and she realized this was exactly the kind of unconscious diplomacy that had replaced whatever used to exist between them — not the warmth, which was still there, but the carelessness. The willingness to let the coffee get cold and not assign it meaning.
"We should do this again," Mira said, and meant it.
"We should," Shay said, and meant it.
They hugged at the door. Mira's hand pressed flat against Shay's back, firm and deliberate, the way you hold something you're about to set down. Shay closed her eyes. For the duration of the hug she let herself believe in the version where they would, in fact, do this again. Where next Saturday or the one after, one of them would text and the other would respond within the hour and they'd sit somewhere and talk and the Hallmark shape would give way to something with sharper edges, something that could cut, and the cutting would be the proof that they'd arrived back at something real.
She walked home with her groceries. The avocados were still in the basket; she'd carried them through the coffee shop and set them under the table like a prop from a scene she'd wandered into.
Martin asked how the shopping went.
"I ran into Mira," she said.
"Mira Kaufman? From college?"
"Yeah."
"How is she?"
"Good. She's good."
She put the avocados in the bowl on the counter. One was overripe; she could tell from how it gave under her thumb. She'd eat that one tonight. The other would be perfect by Wednesday, and by Wednesday the conversation with Mira would have settled into the shape it would hold for the next ten years: a warm memory, perfectly preserved, perfectly useless.