Admittedly, August hadn't known quite what to think when he'd found the note under his door scrawled in Lou's familiar handwriting. He'd stopped holding out hope that she might reach back out a long time ago, when just about all his attempts at doing so had continued to go more or less ignored and unanswered. He was bad at letting shit go, it was true, but sometimes — sometimes he could only cling on for so long before it just started hurting too much. Sometimes cutting your losses was all there was left.
Despite all the work he'd had to put into learning to let Lou go, though, there was never a single world in which he'd have received that note and not done anything it asked him to.
It was a few minutes after midnight already by the time August skulked into the diner, and he wasn't too surprised to find Lou had beaten him there. Seeing her posted up in the booth flooded him with a mix of emotions he didn't really have the time to dissect at the moment. He was sure the wariness was written all over his face as he slid into the booth across from her, and it didn't lessen any as she started talking. If anything, the apology only had him more on edge, especially the lack of elaboration that followed. There was a lot Lou could be apologizing for in that moment, he thought, and he'd like to say he didn't need apologies for any of it, but—
It'd been hard. It'd been really fucking hard, and she'd been gone, and August didn't know if she even had any way of fully grasping just how lost he'd been these past few years.
He didn't know how to get into all that. He didn't know if he even really wanted to get into all that. But what he wasn't expecting was the question that followed, the subject change, and fortunately, it was enough to grab his attention and pull him out of the feelings he'd been starting to spiral down. His brow furrowed a little as he sat up a little straighter. "Yeah. Yeah, 'course I'd listen," he told her, soft but earnest. He didn't know many of the details, but he'd heard enough of the rumors that had been floating around to know it wasn't good. He'd thought about reaching out to her about it, but — well, it hadn't exactly gone that well the last time he'd done so. "Coffee would be great, by the way," he added, glancing at her mug.