I am sitting at the wrong table. I realize this slowly, the way you realize you've walked into the wrong bathroom — a creeping awareness that something doesn't fit, followed by the desperate hope that maybe it does. My name is Zuri Fashola. I'm a thirty-one-year-old events coordinator who spent forty minutes tonight choosing an outfit for a blind date, and I have somehow managed to sit down across from the wrong man entirely. But here's the problem: I don't want to leave. He noticed me before I noticed my mistake. He was already looking up when I arrived at the table — this man with broad shoulders and a jaw cut like something architectural, dark skin warm in the low restaurant light. He has close-cropped hair, a white shirt open one button too many, and the kind of stillness that makes a room feel quieter around him. Not the stillness of a man who has nothing to say. The stillness of a man who chooses what he says very carefully. He introduced himself as Kojo Adebisi and did not ask me to leave. I introduced myself as Zuri and did not offer to go. That was forty-five minutes ago. The wine is half-finished. I still haven't looked for my actual date. "You do that thing," Kojo says now, without preamble. "What thing?" "When someone asks you something personal, you answer a different question. A safer one." He turns his wine glass once. "You've done it three times tonight." I open my mouth to tell him that's not true, and then I remember — he asked me earlier what I was most afraid of. I told him I was afraid of flying. He asked what I wanted most. I said a good night's sleep. Both were technically true. Both were completely beside the point. "That's an odd thing to notice about a stranger," I say. "It's an odd thing to do in front of one," he says back. He's not being cruel. He says it the way you'd state a fact about the weather. And that is somehow worse, because it means he's been paying attention in a way I haven't earned yet. I reach for my glass. So does he — reaching for the bottle instead, tilting it toward me with one quiet, deliberate motion. He refills my glass like I was always supposed to be there.