You have to understand that Ronan had been single for eleven days when he called me.
Not to ask me out. To ask if I thought the fact that High Stakes by Bartolotta was opening the same week he and Petra broke up was "cosmically significant." I said I thought it was a Tuesday. He said he'd already made a reservation for two.
I went because I was curious and also because he'd promised me the tasting menu.
The rain started somewhere around the Menomonee Valley, the kind of heavy, personal Milwaukee rain that gets into your collar and makes every cab driver suddenly philosophical. By the time we got to the restaurant, Ronan's hair was doing something architectural and he had the focused, glittering energy of a man who had decided the evening was already working in his favor.
"We're a little wet," he told the host, which was generous — I looked like I'd been wrung out — "but we made it. That's the first sign."
The host said something about an umbrella stand.
Ronan took this as confirmation.
The restaurant was beautiful in that way Bartolotta restaurants get when they're trying to be serious about something. Low light, good glassware, the kind of quiet that means the acoustics cost money. Ronan had done research. He had opinions about the sourcing. He leaned across the table and told me that Petra had once said she wanted to try "somewhere that felt like a real occasion," and he had found the email to prove it, which he had not sent but had drafted, and which he showed me on his phone before I could stop him.
"Ronan," I said.
"There's more," he said.
There was more.
When the amuse-bouche arrived and the server mentioned it was a mussel from Door County, Ronan went quiet for a moment and then said, very carefully, "Petra grew up near Sturgeon Bay." I told him that was not the same thing. He said geography wasn't really the point.
Somewhere around the second course, thunder came through so loud that everyone in the restaurant did that collective little flinch, and then laughed, and the room got warmer and more itself, the way rooms do when weather reminds everyone they're in the same place together. It was genuinely lovely. Ronan grabbed my arm.
"Did you see that?" he whispered.
"The lightning?"
"The way everyone looked at each other."
"That's just — people do that."
"We do that," he said, meaning him and Petra, and I realized we had entered a phase of the evening where I was functioning primarily as an audience.
The cocktail mirror behind our table was the real villain, honestly. It was one of those antiqued, slightly smoky mirrors that makes everyone look a little mysterious and better-lit than they deserve, and at some point Ronan caught his own reflection in it and got very still.
"I look ready," he said.
"Ready for what?"
He didn't answer. He was nodding at himself.
By dessert — a honey panna cotta that deserved better company — he had constructed an entire narrative arc in which the rain was act one, the mussels were a callback, the thunder was the midseason twist, and him calling Petra from the bathroom was going to be the finale. He framed it using Widows Bay terminology, which I will not repeat here, but it involved the phrase "earned moment."
I told him Petra had blocked him on two platforms.
He said that was very season-one behavior and she'd come around.
The server, who had been nothing but gracious all evening, asked if we'd enjoyed our meal, and Ronan said, "More than you know," and looked at him with an intensity that made the man take a small step back.
Outside, under the restaurant awning, the rain still coming down in sheets, Ronan stood with his phone out and his collar up, looking for all the world like a man in a finale, if the finale had a budget of forty dollars in parking and someone's leftover coat from the umbrella stand.
He texted Petra. She did not respond.
He said: "She's probably processing."
The puddle at the curb was genuinely very large. I watched him step directly into it, phone still out, completely undeterred.
That's Ronan. Every sign was pointing to him. He just forgot to check what they were pointing at.