At 12:18, the generic “made it home?” is already sitting beside three other unopened messages. The reply comes when he mentions the burnt-orange scarf she tucked into her chair after laughing about the waiter who kept hovering near their table.

That detail says he was present without turning the evening into a scorecard. One divorced woman put it bluntly in her group chat: “He remembered the strange part, not the résumé part.” Her friends did not ask whether he was handsome; they asked what else he had caught.

Keep it light enough that she can answer from the hallway, still holding her keys. A line about the borrowed story, the song the bar played twice, or the dessert neither finished gives her a real thread to pull. It beats trying to force a verdict before she has even kicked off the evening.