The Anniversary Toast Chapter 11
Six months to the day after the courthouse, my phone buzzed with a text from an unsaved number.
“Hi Elise. It’s Owen. It’s been six months. Is that coffee offer still open?”
I stared at the message, a smile tugging at my lips before I could stop it.
I typed back: “Saturday, 10am, the café on Maple Street.”
His reply was immediate: “I’ll be there at 9:45.”
Nora, when I told her, raised both eyebrows so high they nearly left her face. “Owen Price. Grant’s brother Owen.”
“It’s just coffee.”
“It’s never just coffee when you smile like that.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You’re smiling right now.”
I was. I couldn’t help it. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t try to stop myself.
Saturday morning, I changed outfits three times – which was three times more than I’d changed for anything since the divorce. I settled on jeans and a white blouse. Simple. No armor needed.
Owen was already there when I arrived, seated at a corner table with two coffees. He stood when he saw me – an old-fashioned gesture that Grant never bothered with.
“You remembered,” I said, nodding at the oat milk latte he’d ordered for me.
“You mentioned it at the courthouse. That you’d switched to oat milk.”
I sat down, wrapping my hands around the warm cup. “You have a good memory.”
“Only for things that matter.”
We talked for three hours. Not about Grant or Audrey or the wreckage they’d left behind. We talked about his architecture practice, my writing, the books we were reading, the places we wanted to travel. He told me about hiking in Patagonia and how he’d once gotten lost for six hours and survived on trail mix and stubbornness. I told him about the novel I was drafting – something I hadn’t told anyone except Nora.
He listened the way some people listen – leaning forward, asking follow-up questions, remembering details from earlier in the conversation and circling back to them.
“You’re nothing like your brother,” I said, and immediately regretted it. “Sorry. I shouldn’t—”
“No,” he said. “Don’t apologize. I’ve spent my whole life being compared to Grant. Being told I was the quiet one, the boring one, the one who didn’t light up a room.” He paused. “Turns out, the guy who lights up the room sometimes burns it down.”
I looked at him across the table – this steady, thoughtful man who shared Grant’s last name but nothing else – and felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Hope.
Not the desperate, clinging hope of trying to save something broken. But the quiet, clean hope of something genuinely new.
“Same time next Saturday?” he asked as we walked out.
“Same time next Saturday,” I said.