Looking For A Husband – Chapter 3 – The First Candidate

His name was Reez.

Diane delivered this information at brunch the following morning with the energy of a woman presenting a business proposal she was very confident in, which should have been my first warning sign, because Diane’s confidence and actual accuracy have historically operated on separate tracks.

“Reez?” I asked.

“Short for something longer that nobody uses.” She refilled her coffee. “He’s thirty-five. Owns his own landscaping company. Hikes, climbs, runs, generally treats his body like a temple, which – ” she gestured at me with her mug “- taller than you, obviously, because everyone is basically taller than you – “

“I’m five-six.”

“- has his life together, gets along with everyone, genuinely one of the nicest people I’ve met in the last two years.” She sat back with the satisfaction of a woman who has just closed an argument. “He’s on your list, Rachel. Almost point for point.”

I looked around the table. Maya was nodding. Carla was nodding. Pete was eating toast and staying entirely out of it, which was the smartest thing anyone was doing.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

“Work overlap. He did the landscaping for an event I coordinated last spring. We’ve had coffee twice. He’s a good person.”

“Does he know about the bet?”

“He knows I have a friend I’d like him to meet.”

“So no.”

“Details can come later.” She pushed the syrup toward me. “The point is – he fits. At least on paper. And you said you were going to actually look this time.”

I took the syrup. Thought about it.

“Fine,” I said. “How do we do this?”

Diane smiled.

I should have been more suspicious of that smile.

The setup was a group hike, which was Diane’s idea and which I agreed to with the misguided confidence of someone who has done exactly zero hikes in the past three years but once walked a nature trail in good weather and felt it went well.

The plan was simple: our usual group, plus Reez, a Sunday morning trail about forty minutes outside the city, casual, low-pressure, everyone together so it didn’t feel like a setup even though it was entirely a setup.

I spent Saturday evening picking an outfit, which was its own small humiliation – I owned exactly one pair of hiking boots, purchased for a trip I took four years ago and not worn since, and they required twenty minutes of searching before I found them at the back of my closet behind a box of salon supply catalogs. I tried them while standing in my bedroom. They still fit. Small mercy.

I wore the boots and jeans and a flannel I’d had for years and stood in front of my mirror and thought: this is what you look like when you try. Not bad. Different from my usual – I lived in skirts and dresses, always had, and seeing myself in jeans felt vaguely like wearing a costume. But functional. Appropriately outdoorsy without being a lie about who I was.

I drove to the trailhead with Maya, who spent the forty minutes telling me to just be normal, just be yourself, it’s not an interview in the specific tone of someone who says relaxing things in a way that makes you less relaxed.

“I’m normal,” I said.

“You’re interviewing people for a husband position. That’s not normal.”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s terrifying.”

“Maya.”

“I say that with love.”

“I know.” I signaled the turn. “Does he seem genuinely nice?”

She was quiet for a second. “Yeah,” she said. “Diane’s not wrong about that part.”

That part. I noted the qualification.

Reez was already at the trailhead when we arrived, talking to Drew and Pete with the easy body language of a man who was comfortable anywhere. Diane hadn’t been wrong about the physical description – he was tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of effortlessly fit that came from actually using his body regularly rather than performing wellness. Dark hair, easy smile, the specific warmth in his eyes of someone who found people genuinely interesting rather than merely tolerable.

He turned when we walked up and the smile didn’t change in the calculating way smiles sometimes change when someone’s been told to expect you. It just stayed warm.

“Rachel,” Diane said, with the completely unnecessary weight of a woman introducing two people at an auction. “Reez.”

“Hey.” He extended his hand. “Good to finally – Diane talks about you.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Mostly.” His eyes did the thing – the brief, honest assessment that people do when they meet someone new, before social convention kicks in and tells them to pretend they’re not doing it. Then: “All good things.”

“Nice save,” I said.

He laughed. Real laugh, not a courtesy one. “It was genuine. I just like the pause.”

Okay. Points for that.

We hit the trail in a loose group, the way these things go – pairs and trios forming and dissolving as the terrain shifted, conversations overlapping and separating. I ended up walking with Reez for most of the first hour, which was either organic or orchestrated, and given that I caught Diane physically steering Maya away from us at one point, I had my suspicions.

He was easy to talk to. That was the first thing. Not in a performed way, not in the way of a man who had been told to be charming and was executing the brief – just genuinely easy, the way some people are, like conversation was a thing that happened naturally around them rather than something that required maintenance.

We talked about the salon – he’d heard the basic outline from Diane, wanted the real version, asked specific questions that suggested he’d actually thought about what he was asking. I told him about the loan, the first year, the moment it started working. He told me about the landscaping company – started it because he was good at it and liked being outside and didn’t see a reason to give half his life to someone else’s business when he could give it to his own.

“Reasonable,” I said.

“That’s my whole philosophy.”

“Mine too, apparently.”

He smiled sideways at me. “Diane said you made a list.”

I nearly turned an ankle on a root. “She told you about the list?”

“She told me you were serious about what you wanted. In those words.” He stepped over a creek crossing without breaking stride. “I respect that. Most people aren’t.”

“I’m a planner.”

“I can tell.” Not said critically. Just observed.

I looked at him – the easy confidence, the actual height, the genuine warmth, the man who owned his own business and hiked on Sundays and made conversation feel like something that didn’t require effort – and thought: he’s on the list. Genuinely, actually, almost point for point.

The afternoon continued like that. Good conversation, genuine laughter, the friends doing increasingly unsubtle things to leave us in proximity to each other – at one point Drew literally stopped walking and pretended to have something in his shoe until the group moved ahead and left Reez and me together on a stretch of trail, at which point I caught Reez’s eye and we both acknowledged with a single look that we were aware of what was happening and were choosing to be adults about it.

That was maybe the moment I liked him most.

We stopped for lunch at a flat outcrop with a view that earned the forty-minute drive – the city just visible in the distance, the land doing its broad, unhurried thing between here and there. Someone had packed too much food, which meant there was enough for everyone plus extras, and we sat in the sun and ate and talked and the afternoon had the specific, warm quality of a day that’s going well.

I looked at Reez laughing at something Carla said, head thrown back, completely unguarded, and thought: this could work. Maybe. Possibly. The list said yes on almost every item and the afternoon said yes and something in me was doing the cautious, unfamiliar thing of actually considering it.

I let myself consider it for the rest of the hike.

I was still considering it on the drive back, Maya beside me quiet in the way she was quiet when she was waiting to see what I’d say first.

“He’s great,” I said finally.

“He is,” she said.

“He’s on the list.”

“He is.”

“But?”

She was quiet for just a beat too long.

“Maya.”

“I don’t want to say anything,” she said. “I think it’s better if you just – talk to him more. Get to know him.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer I have right now.”

I looked at the road. Turned that over.

“Is there something wrong with him?”

“No,” she said, immediately and genuinely. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with him.”

Nothing wrong with him and he’s perfect for you were, I was noticing, two different sentences. I’d been in enough client consultations to know when someone was being careful with their words.

I drove home with the list sitting in my head and Reez’s easy smile in my memory and the specific, low-level unease of a woman who has learned to pay attention to the things people don’t say.

I texted him that evening. Just: good to meet you today. Good hike.

He replied in three minutes: you too. Fair warning – Diane’s already texted me twice.

I laughed at my phone.

She means well.

I know, he sent back. Hey – can we get coffee this week? Just us. I have something I want to tell you.

I looked at that message for a long moment.

Something he wanted to tell me.

I typed: Sure. Thursday?

Thursday works.

I put the phone down.

He was on the list. He was genuinely great. He wanted to tell me something.

In my experience, when someone great wants to tell you something, it goes one of two ways.

Thursday was going to be very interesting.

We met at the coffee place on Mercer Street, the good one, the one with the big windows and the mismatched chairs and the barista who remembered your order after the second visit. I got there first, ordered, took a window seat, and spent four minutes talking myself out of being weird about whatever he was going to say.

He walked in, ordered, sat down across from me, wrapped both hands around his mug, and said, with the specific directness of a man who had clearly also talked himself through this:

“I’m gay.”

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

Outside, a truck went past. The barista called someone’s name. A chair scraped somewhere behind me.

“Okay,” I said.

“I probably should have led with that.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “Though to be fair, Diane probably should have led with that.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “Diane doesn’t know.”

“Diane – wait, she doesn’t know?”

“She knows I’m a good guy who needs to meet more people.” He opened his eyes. “She didn’t know the specific direction of that need.”

I sat with that for a moment. Then I picked up my coffee and took a long sip and thought about the hike and the list and Maya’s very careful word choices and the forty-seven messages in the group chat and the handshake bet and all of it, the whole architecture of the last two weeks, and I started laughing.

Not polite laughing. The real kind. The kind that made the barista glance over.

Reez watched me with the cautious expression of a man who wasn’t sure yet if this was a good sign.

“I’m sorry,” I said, when I could. “I’m not – this isn’t at you.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just – ” I waved a hand. “The list. The plan. The hike. Diane engineering the whole – ” I laughed again. “I made a husband list and she found me the most genuinely perfect person on it who is also not available for the position.”

His mouth twitched. “When you put it that way.”

“Tell me everything,” I said. “And then tell me if you want to get another coffee, because I think we might actually be friends.”

He smiled then – the real one, the unguarded one, the one I’d seen on the trail when he wasn’t thinking about it.

“I think we might be too,” he said.

I pulled out my phone.

Opened the group chat.

Typed: Update incoming. Diane, we need to talk. Also Reez – add him to the chat.

The responses started before I’d put the phone back down.

Three months. One candidate down. Two to go, though I didn’t know that yet.

I finished my coffee and looked at my new friend across the table and thought: well. At least the plan is working. Technically.

Technically was going to have to be enough for now.