"Before all this," he said, not entirely sure he was going to say anything until he was already saying it, his voice coming out quiet and unhurried in the way of something that had been sitting in his chest for a while and had chosen this particular soft silence to surface, "I would have taken you to breakfast. Proper breakfast, the kind with too much coffee and those little jam portions that you have to open four of to make it worth it."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"And I would have been insufferably early to pick you up," he continued, "because I would have been worried you'd think I wasn't coming, and I would have brought you flowers that I pretended were casual and definitely thought about for three days, and I would have sat across from you and talked about nothing for two hours and thought about nothing except whether you were going to smile again."
The teacup shifted slightly in her hands.
