The coffee shop with the green door was on a corner two blocks from Caitlin's building.
I got there at 8:51.
She was already inside. Window seat, back to the wall, two mugs on the table in front of her. She'd ordered for both of us. The mug on her side of the table had a fresh inch of frost rim around the lip that I could see from the doorway.
She caught my eye through the glass.
She wrapped her hand around the mug as I came in. The frost was gone by the time I sat down.
"Hi."
"Hi."
She'd taken the trouble to look like a person who hadn't agonized over what to wear. A grey sweater over a button-down. Hair down. Lipstick that I could tell she'd put on and then thought about taking off and then left on. The lipstick decision had taken about four minutes. I'd stopped guessing at things like that around month three of knowing her.
I sat. Pulled the second mug across.
"You ordered."
"You take it the same way you took it in March."
"Yeah."
"I remembered."
We drank.
A minute went by. The shop was busier than it should have been for a Tuesday morning. A woman in a hospital scrub shirt was on a laptop two tables down. The barista at the counter was running a milk steamer that hissed every forty seconds.
"You're going to make me start," I said.
"I am."
"Okay."
She set her mug down very precisely.
"You've changed."
I waited.
"Since the singularity. I thought it was just — I thought you'd processed something, gotten past something. People do. People come out of grief sharper. That happens. That's a thing I've watched happen to people I worked with. I was telling myself that was you."
"Okay."
"It's not that."
"Okay."
"You're — and this is the doctor talking, not — you're moving differently. You're carrying weight in your shoulders you didn't carry. You're sitting like a person who knows where the exits are and didn't used to. The bruise yesterday — you came in with a deep impact bruise and your gait was wrong by fourteen percent on the right side and by morning you were walking it off, and I know your healing rate, Harry, I have your charts, that's not your healing rate."
"I —"
"Wait. I'm not done."
"Okay."
She drank. Set the mug down.
"You took down a gravity meta in a parking garage and you used three abilities in twenty seconds. Your usual is one. Maybe one and a half. The way you came around that pillar — I watched the security footage twice last night. You phased through his pull. Phasing doesn't work on gravity. Cisco and I have been over the math. Your phasing should not have done what it did. Either I don't understand phasing, or you don't have just phasing."
"Caitlin —"
"I'm still not done."
She lifted her hand off the table. Held it palm-up, very steady, between us. The fingertips had a faint sheen across them. Frost. She let it sit there for three full seconds, where I could see it, where the woman in the scrub shirt two tables down could not. Then she turned her hand and brushed it against her thigh and the frost was gone.
"I'm telling you this," she said quietly, "because you're the only person in my life who's already noticed and didn't make it a thing. So I'm trusting you with that. Now I'm asking you to trust me back. Not all the way. Not everything. Just — not nothing."
I held her look.
I'd had three drafts ready in my head from the drive over. None of them had survived contact with that hand on the table.
"My powers are evolving," I said. Slowly. The first true thing I'd said about myself to anyone in months, even if it was the smallest version of the true thing. "They're not what they were when I first showed them to the team. They're getting stronger. I'm getting better at using them. There are — more than three. I didn't lie when I said three. Three was what I could control then. Some of what I have now I couldn't have shown you in June even if I'd wanted to."
"Okay."
"I wasn't sure it was safe to bring up. The team was rebuilding trust. Every time I added a piece I thought I'd lose ground."
"Reasonable."
"I'm not going to give you the whole list this morning."
"I'm not asking for it this morning."
"Okay."
"I want it eventually."
"Eventually you'll have it."
"Okay."
She took a small breath and let it out and her shoulders came down a half inch.
"And you're not," she said, "going to disappear into whatever this is. Are you."
"No."
"Don't."
"I won't."
"Because we have lost a lot of people, Harry. The team. I've lost — I've lost a lot of people. I'm not adding you to a list."
"You're not."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She looked at the mug. Her hand went back around it. Her fingertips were dry.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
I sipped my coffee.
It had gone almost cold while she was talking. I drank it anyway. It tasted right.
After a while she said, "That meeting we had yesterday in your medical bay. The bruise. When you said practice."
"Yeah."
"That was a lie."
"Half."
"What was the truth."
"That I've been doing other work."
"Field work the team doesn't see."
"Yes."
She thought about it.
"I'm not going to ask the next question yet," she said. "I want you to know I'm choosing not to."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. That's a withdrawal from a balance I'm keeping."
"Noted."
She almost smiled.
She didn't, quite.
She paid for the coffee on the way out, because she'd ordered, and on the sidewalk she stopped and turned to me.
"My hand," she said. "The frost."
"Yeah."
"When."
"When you're ready."
"Same as before."
"Same as before."
She nodded.
She walked east toward the lab. I walked west toward my apartment.
I felt the specific sensation of having pulled a tooth without anesthetic, which is to say less pain than I'd been bracing for and more relief than I'd budgeted.
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