Then I glance at the empty chair again and check my phone under the table.
Nothing from George.
He does know I'm coming, doesn't he.The thought arrives quietly and, once it appears, refuses to leave.
Eleanor refills my glass without being asked and asks about my work with the genuine interest of someone who has actually been briefed on me, which is either sweet or slightly alarming, and probably both. I answer on autopilot, smiling at the right moments, while one corner of my brain begins constructing aquiet, terrible theory. Laughter erupts at the far end of the table. I laugh too, one beat late and with no idea why. I straighten my cutlery for something to do with my hands.
George asked me to be his girlfriend. This is part of the deal.I pick up my wine again.This is fine.
Dinner arrives and I'm grateful for the distraction of passing dishes. Eleanor, who turns out to have excellent comic timing, informs me that George once got his head stuck between the stair railings at age seven and had to be extracted with butter.
Then the front door opens.
Every cell in my body goes very still.
I can hear footsteps in the hallway and then George Maddox walks into the dining room still in his coat, colour high in his cheeks from the cold, looking like he's just come in from somewhere real and brisk and entirely unaware of what he's walking into.
He is, in his own quietly geeky way, objectively and unfairly good-looking, and I hate that I notice it every single time.
His eyes sweep the table. They land on me.
He stops.
He has the expression of a man who has just stepped off a curb he didn't know was there. His eyes widen like that half-second of freefall before the pavement arrives.
I give him my warmest smile.
He doesn't return it.
"Tessa." My name comes out carefully, the way you'd say the name of something you weren't entirely sure was real.
"Hi," I say. It is possibly the smallest word I have ever produced.
He looks at his mother. Something fast and wordless passes between them and I don't have the decoder ring for any of it.
Eleanor beams at him like she's done something wonderful and is waiting to be thanked for it.
I watch him process that beam, watch something shift and settle behind his eyes, and I can identify the precise moment he begins to understand exactly what has happened here.
My face is very warm. I am deeply, sincerely grateful for the wine.
George pulls off his coat with the deliberate focus of a man who needs thirty seconds to collect himself, and Daniel helpfully lifts it from his hands without being asked. He sits down beside me (what else can he do, really) and the chair legs scrape against the floor in the sudden, shimmering quiet. He's close enough that I can smell the cold air still clinging to the fabric of his sleeve, clean and wintry.
"Sorry I'm late," he says to the table.
Dinner resumes. Margaret asks Daniel about the florist. Eleanor debates linen colours with great conviction. George eats with the careful, methodical focus of a man thinking about several things simultaneously, and none of them appear to be the pasta. I remember the text he'd sent earlier in the week.Hold hands. It was written like a logistical instruction, like a note on a meeting agenda. I can follow instructions.
His hand rests on the table near mine.
I take a breath.
I reach across the small, charged space between our chairs and find his hand under the edge of the table. My fingers settle over his.
He freezes. His fork stops halfway to his mouth and stays there, suspended, as though someone has pressed pause on him from a distance. For a full second he doesn't react at all, like his brain has temporarily disconnected from the rest of his body, and I have just enough time to thinkoh nobefore —
He coughs.
Once. Twice. Then with genuine, escalating violence.
