We meet for coffee the following week.

  Lilia picks the place, a small one two streets from the bench, and she’s already there when I arrive. She’s the kind of person who shows up early without making a thing of it.

  “You look better,” she says when I sit down.

  “Than what?”

  “Than the bench.”

  I laugh. It comes out real. “That’s a low bar.”

  “Still counts.”

  She asks about my university, my course, what I want to do after. Normal questions but she asks them like she actually wants to know. I answer more than I mean to. She has that effect. She listens in a way that makes you want to keep talking.

  I ask about her family. She lights up.

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  “It’s just me and my mom and my dad,” she says. “But it’s good. Really good actually.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My mom is just. She notices things. Like I mentioned once, probably in passing, that I liked a specific kind of tea. Three weeks later it was just in the cupboard. She didn’t say anything about it. It was just there.”

  I smile at that.

  “And she always knows when something’s wrong,” Lilia continues. “Like I don’t even have to say anything. She just looks at me and she knows and she makes the soup.”

  “There’s a specific soup?”

  “There is absolutely a specific soup.” Lilia grins. “I don’t know what’s in it. I’ve never asked. I just know that when I’m sick or sad or whatever, the soup shows up.”

  I laugh. “That’s really nice.”

  “She’s really nice.” Lilia looks at her cup, fond and easy. “I know not everyone has that. I think I got lucky.”

  I look at the table.

  You did, I think. You really did.

  “She sounds amazing,” I say, and I mean it completely.

  Walking home afterward I think about the soup. The tea in the cupboard. The way Lilia talked about her mother the way you talk about something you’ve never had to be afraid of losing.

  I wonder what that feels like.

  The familiar thing tugs at me again and I push it down.

  I get home and text Lilia a stupid joke. She sends back three responses before I’ve put my phone down.

  I think we’re going to be friends, I think.

  I haven’t thought that in a long time.