“You are absolutely not fine. Your mouth is saying ‘fine’ but your eyes say something happened that I’m going to need to sitdown for.” She pins her name tag on and gives me the look. The one that reminds me she’s been waiting for an update on Alec ever since I replied “suitemate situation has improved” when she texted and then went radio silent on eleven follow-up questions. “So. You want to tell me what happened in Barbados? This ain’t Vegas, baby. You can’t leave it there. You know I’m going to interrogate you for all the juicy deets.”
The laugh that comes out of me is small and broken and surprises us both.
Lisa’s expression shifts. The teasing drains out of it. “Ella, hey. Come on. You look sad and I don’t like it. What happened?”
I give her the first piece while we’re both refilling coffee pots. Just the headline, because that’s all I can manage right now.
“I slept with him.”
Lisa’s hand freezes on the carafe. She turns to look at me. “The cold toaster.”
I exhale a humorless laugh and nod. “His name is Alec.”
“Order up!” Tony calls from the window.
I grab the plates. Lisa follows me across the floor, her voice dropped to a stage whisper.
“When you say you slept with him, do you mean once, purely out of proximity and boredom, or do you mean...”
“I mean I fell in love with him.” I set the plates down at table nine with a wink. “Enjoy your pancakes.” I turn back to Lisa. “I fell completely in love with him, and then the whole thing blew apart.”
Lisa stares at me across the table I’ve just served. A man with a short stack between us, chewing and pretending not to hear. “What do you mean it blew apart? Did the toaster turn out to be an asshole?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
She gets the story in pieces over the next hour, between the pass window and the coffee station and a whispered confessionover the ketchup caddy at table four. Not the whole thing. The pieces that matter: that the grumpy man from my texts turned out to be someone else entirely. That he made me laugh. That he saw me in a way no one has. That I stopped wanting my own room and started wanting him.
Lisa listens the way she tends to do, which is with her whole face. I watch her opinion of Alec change in real time, the scowling, uptight villain of my early vacation texts dissolving into someone she can see I truly care about. More than care. Someone I love, even now.
“Ella.” She says my name like she’s testing whether I can take what she’s about to ask. We’re restocking sugar packets at the dessert case, shoulder to shoulder. “What did he do to you?”
The answer doesn’t come out the way I planned. It comes out flat and factual because flat is all I’ve got. Photographers on a Brooklyn sidewalk. A company called HoloTech. Fourteen billion dollars. A man who listened to me confide about my lottery winnings while the number in his own life could have funded a small country.
“He lied to me for ten days. Not about how he felt. About who he was.” I wipe down the counter because my hands need something to do. “And when I found out, I left. I packed my bag and I walked out while he was still talking.”
Lisa is quiet. Not the thinking quiet. The quiet that means she heard the truth under the simply stated facts I’m giving her.
“He told me he loved me while I was walking out the door.” My voice is steady, but it’s a struggle to keep it that way. “I didn’t even turn around to look at him.”
She doesn’t offer a platitude. She doesn’t tell me he’s not worth it or that I did the right thing. She just looks at me, and her eyes are asking the question before her mouth does.
“Do you wish you had stayed?”
The honest answer is the one that’s been sitting on my chest this whole time. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.” I wring the dishcloth over the sink. “I think I was so scared of staying for the wrong reasons that I left for the wrong ones.”
Lisa puts her hand on my arm. Her fingers are warm, grounding. She holds on while I focus on breathing while the kitchen clangs behind us and the diner keeps moving around us.
Across the room, a customer raises his hand. Lisa looks at him, looks back at me.
“Hold that thought,” she says, and goes.
The lunch tables turn. I carry plates and pour refills and take orders with the bright, steady voice I’ve used since long before Barbados. The one that sounds like me but isn’t, not all the way. The version that asks, “You doing okay over here?” while pulling warmth from a reserve tank that doesn’t need the rest of me to be working.
I learned this performance a long time ago. How to get smaller without anyone noticing. How to carry plates and heartbreak at the same time. The skill is so practiced now that my smile looks real from the outside even when the inside has gone dark. I hate that I’m good at it. I hate that Alec has put me back in this costume. But even that’s not fair. I chose to be here instead of listening to what he had to say. If anyone is to blame for the way my heart is aching, it’s me as much as him.
The afternoon stretches. Tables empty and fill and empty again. Lisa clocks out at five with a hug, saying, “Call me tomorrow—I mean it!”
Then I’m on my own for the last hour. The rush thins. The silence from Alec settles heavier in the stillness.
