The bell chimed under his hand.
The smell hit him: espresso and warm paper and somebody’s cinnamon.
And he understood, between the sound and the step, exactly where and when he was.
He knew the door.
He knew the bell.
He knew the woman with the dog-eared paperback at the window table, the one who’d looked up at the chime and was already half-rising, smiling the smile of someone who’d recognized her date before he’d recognized himself.
Jess Day.
The date that ended in three weeks was starting right now.
His hand was still on the door.
The bell was still chiming.
The polite lean was there, the easy nod, the ten-second walk to the table.
The reflex was already surging up: sorry, sorry, the traffic was, or I should’ve texted, or let me get the door for you: a whole sentence of apology for arriving at the exact second he was supposed to.
He caught it.
Caught the spiral in the middle of the first syllable and held it.
Don’t apologize.
Don’t fill the space.
You have one move here, and it isn’t the ninety-second monologue.
He stepped inside.
The door swung shut behind him, cutting the street noise to a distant hum, and the coffee shop pulled him forward into its warmth: the low chatter, the hiss of steam, the particular LA-morning light that came through a dust-streaked window and made everything look like it was already being filmed.
He was wearing a blue button-down the body had picked, which meant he didn’t remember choosing it.
He had cash in his wallet and a phone in his pocket and a whole life he’d inherited thirty seconds ago and hadn’t had time to inventory.
He wasn’t going to inventory it.
That was the first rule.
You’re Robby McFerrin.
You’re twenty-seven.
You’re on a blind date that a friend of a friend of a friend set up, and the woman at the table is beautiful and warm and wearing a polka-dot dress, and you know exactly how this goes wrong.
Jess had stood fully now, one hand holding the paperback she’d been reading — something with a dog-eared spine and a bookmark two-thirds through — and the other hand half-lifted in a wave.
Her glasses were on a chain.
Her smile had a question in it.
He crossed the room.
Three steps.
Four.
The barista said something about a name for the order; he didn’t hear it.
The whole room went tunnel-quiet around the woman at the window table, and the map in his head was screaming at him, sharp, clear, every beat of the next three weeks laid out like a script he’d watched six times through.
Say hello first.
Let her speak.
Don’t talk about the test until you’ve sat down.
Don’t,
The spiral was already coiling.
He could feel it: the body’s instinct to over-explain before he’d even said a word, to fill the silence with a ramble about traffic or the menu or how great it was to finally meet her.
A tide of pleasant nothing.
He opened his mouth.
Option one: the safe start.
“Hi, you must be Jess — sorry, I was trying to find parking —”
Option two: the brave one.
“— before we get coffee,” he said, “there’s a real chance we’re distantly related.”
Jess blinked.
The hand holding the paperback lowered a half-inch.
The question in her smile didn’t vanish, but it changed shape, from who is this guy to who IS this guy, and she tilted her head the way a person tilts their head when they’re deciding whether to laugh or bolt.
“That’s,” she said slowly, “not the worst first sentence I’ve ever heard.
It’s in the top five, though.
Are you — is this a test of my sense of humor, or is there a whole sentence after that?”
“There’s a whole sentence after that.” He said it calmly, and the calm surprised him: the body had been ready to over-apologize, but the transmigrator had found a pocket of stillness somewhere behind the reflex.
“I think we might share a great-aunt.
Through the Pollack side of your mother’s family.
I have a — a feeling about it.
A strong feeling.
And I think we should verify it before either of us gets attached.”
The silence that followed was exactly one beat longer than comfortable.
Then Jess laughed.
Not a polite laugh, not a what-do-I-do-with-this laugh: a real one, surprised out of her, the kind that took over her face and made her glasses bounce on their chain.
She set the paperback down on the table and put both hands flat on the wood, like she was steadying herself.
“You want to DNA test me,” she said.
“On the first date.
Before coffee.”
“Not the whole date.
Just the coffee part.”
“That’s — that’s very thorough date planning.”
“I’m a case manager.
We plan for outcomes.”
She laughed again, and this time the table behind him turned: a guy in a beanie glanced over, decided it wasn’t his business, went back to his laptop.
Jess wiped her eye.
“Okay.
Okay, I need you to sit down before I decide you’re a performance artist.
Sit.
Tell me why you think we’re related, and I will tell you whether it’s weird or charming.”
He sat.
The chair scraped the floor.
The espresso machine hissed.
And the map in his head, which had been running the three-week timer from the moment he’d touched the door, quieted by one full second, because he’d taken the move that wasn’t on any script, and the script was already wrong.
“I don’t know why I think it,” he said.
“I just have a feeling about the Pollack name.
My grandmother was a Pollack — well, her mother was, I think.
I looked it up once, ages ago, and I remembered.
And when my friend said her name was Day, I — the connection clicked.
I can’t explain it better than that.”
“You looked up your own family tree because of a feeling about my last name.”
“I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds like the setup to a very specific kind of disaster.”
“It could also be the setup to a very specific kind of relief.
If we test it now, it’s just a funny story.
If we test it in three weeks, it’s a problem.”
Jess picked up her coffee cup, empty, she’d been waiting, and turned it in her hands, reading the rim like it might have instructions.
“You’re not the kind of person who leads with a DNA test.”
“I’m not usually.
But I have a strong feeling about this one.”
“And the feeling is significant enough to ask a stranger to swab her cheek on a first date.”
“Not until after coffee.
I have standards.”
She laughed again, and this time it was softer, more settling.
She put the cup down and extended a hand across the table, not for a shake, but to stop him, to hold the space.
“Okay.
Here’s my counter-offer.
We have coffee.
A normal coffee.
If by the end of it I still think you’re not a serial killer with a very elaborate Pollack genealogical entry strategy, I will let you plan the swab.
Deal?”
“Deal.”
“And you have to tell me about your job.
The case-manager thing.
Because I teach fourth grade, and I need to know if your version of ‘plan for outcomes’ is more or less elaborate than mine.”
“Mine involves more paperwork and fewer macaroni necklaces.”
“Okay, that’s — that’s a solid opening gambit.
I’m going to need you to keep that energy through the latte.”
She flagged the barista.
He ordered a black coffee, which the body’s caffeine tolerance seemed comfortable with, and Jess ordered something with oat milk and a name that took two tries to pronounce.
The morning light shifted through the dust-streaked window.
The bell on the door chimed for a new customer.
And Robby sat across from a woman who was going to know, by the end of this hour, that he was either the most earnest man she’d ever met or the most elaborate disaster, and he was okay with both outcomes.
The map was already drifting.
He could feel it: the date was diverging, sentence by sentence, from the thing he’d watched.
The DNA question had changed the starting conditions, and the starting conditions determined everything that followed.
He didn’t know yet what would come next.
That was, he realized, the interesting part.
One question down.
The week of waiting starts tomorrow.