Chicago, 1994. Snow ticks against the diner window. Mara wraps her cold hands around a coffee that went cold an hour ago and watches Theo butter the same piece of toast for the third time. They are twenty-three. For a whole year they've been not-quite-together, a thing made of late buses and almosts. Outside, his bus pulls up to the curb. Theo puts the knife down and looks at her like he wants to say something.

Neither of them moves. The bus idles, then groans, then pulls away from the curb without Theo on it. He watches it shrink down the snowy street. "Well," he says quietly. "Guess I'm staying a while." Mara's heart kicks. A whole night, unplanned, just opened up between them.

Theo settles back into the booth. "So," he says. "A whole night and no bus to catch. What do people like us even do with that?" Mara smiles. "We could finally talk. The real kind." Theo swallows. "That's scarier than the snow." But he nods.

So they talk. Really talk, for the first time in a year. He tells her he almost said it a hundred times. She tells him she stayed at the bus stop long after he left, every time. By midnight the snow has buried the street and neither one is going anywhere. "This," Mara says softly. "This is what we kept almost having."