"I — yes. Coffee."
"Coffee n'est pas déjeuner." She's already unpacking. Cutting board. Onions. A block of cheese I don't recognize. Herbs in a plastic bag. She moves through Ethan's kitchen the way I move through my own apartment — without thinking, without checking, without opening the wrong drawer first.
She opens the spice cupboard. She reaches for the oregano without looking.
I didn't know there was oregano.
She finds a pot — the tall one, behind the rice cooker — and fills it at the sink. She knows which element works better. She turns on the smaller one, the one on the left, the one I didn't use last night because I used the big one and the big one was too hot and the heat was uneven and the oil started spitting and —
I stop. I breathe.
My phone buzzes. Derek again.The wife thinks the hero banner is "too aggressive." Can we soften? Also — any chance we move the tagline down? Appreciate it!!
From the living room, I hear Ethan and Camille talking. His voice is different with her — lighter, faster, peppered with the Québécois slang he never uses with me. She says something I don't catch and he laughs. A real laugh, not the careful kind. She calls back a question about whether he still has bay leaves and he says third shelf, behind the paprika, and she finds them without hesitating.
She's making a soupe aux légumes. I can tell from the smell — onion, celery, carrot, the holy trinity of comfort food in every francophone kitchen I've ever been in. I know this soup. I could make this soup.
But I didn't.
He must have called her. Or she came on her own — Camille does things like that, just shows up, just handles it. Either way, the morning after I set off his smoke alarm and cried on his floor, there's a woman in his kitchen making soup from memory, and it isn't me.
The thought settles into the place where last night's shame left a convenient empty space.He watched you ruin his pan and cry into a dish towel and talk to his cat like a woman who has lost the thread, and the next morning his sister is here, doing the thing you couldn't do, and she isn't even trying hard.
This isn't jealousy. Camille is his little sister. She's twenty-three and very sweet and she once announced in his hospital room that her boyfriend's was "pretty average" just to make him laugh through the morphine, and I like her. This isn't about Camille.
This is about the fact that she knows where the oregano is and I don't.
"Nora, tu veux goûter?" She's holding out a wooden spoon, asking if I want a taste. The soup smells perfect. She looks at me with the easy generosity of a person who belongs here.
"Ça sent bon." I taste it. It's delicious. Of course it's delicious.
I go back to my laptop. I soften the banner. I mock up three heading options in Playfair Display, each one somehow managing to be both rustic and aggressive despite my best efforts. I respond to Derek with the professionalism of a woman whose internal organs are not currently rearranging themselves in shame.
When I bring Ethan his bowl, my hands don't shake. My posture is correct. I even manage a joke about Camille being a better cook than both of us, and it lands — he smiles, she laughs, the room is warm and normal and fine.
I am performing at a level I have not reached in weeks. Every gesture calibrated. Every word the right weight. The display version of Nora Chen, now in 4K resolution, no buffering.
The worse thing is: it's working. Everyone believes it. Why wouldn't they? I'm very, very good at this.
Sophie shows up around eleven.
She looks tired — five days in Toronto for a new social media strategy pitch, dark circles under her eyes that she hasn't bothered to conceal because Sophie doesn't conceal things, which is one of the many differences between us that I try not to think about too hard. She's been by a few times since the accident — brought that weird bone broth to the hospital, dropped off Ethan's charger once — but this is the first time she's been here since I moved in.
"Hey." She drops her bag by the door and takes off her boots and looks toward the couch where Ethan is propped up with Bagel on his lap. "Hey, Ethan. How's the — everything?"
"Still broken," he says. "But the cat's doing great."
Sophie does a small laugh — not quite relaxed, not quite awkward. She's still careful around him. There's a weight between them that neither of them talks about, and I don't push it. She gives him a little wave, he gives her a little nod, and whatever is between them gets filed away for later — as it always does.
Then she turns to me and does the thing Sophie does, which is see me. Not elaborate — just a beat where her eyes register something and then she decides whether to say it.
Camille left twenty minutes ago. The apartment smells like her soup. Poutine is on the bookshelf, judging the room with her usual contempt.
"You look nice," Sophie says.
It's a simple sentence. She means it. But there's a frequency underneath it — a vibration that only fourteen years of friendship can detect — that says:Why do you look like you're going to a meeting?
"Thanks. How was Toronto?"
