“Are you going to?”
“I have to.”
“But not yet?”
“Not yet.”
Charisse comes back on the line, breathless. “Sorry. Sky tried to feed Naya a marker. What did I miss?”
“Javonte leased Lily a studio without asking her,” Porsche says.
Charisse goes quiet.
I wait for her to give me the softer answer. The balanced answer. The one that makes me feel less certain and more guilty.
Instead, she says, “Oh, Lily.”
My throat tightens.
“I know.”
“That probably felt like him choosing a future for you.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“And after everything, you needed him to choose you, not choose for you.”
I sit all the way down on the couch and nod into the camera.
Porsche clears her throat. “I mean, I was going to say that too. I just like to get to things in my own way.”
Charisse laughs softly. “Sure.”
“I did.”
I wipe under my eye before a tear can fall. “I don’t want to break up with him again.”
“Then don’t make the decision tonight,” Charisse says. “But don’t swallow it either.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t let him make this about whether the studio is beautiful,” Porsche adds. “That is not the issue.”
“No. It’s not,” Charisse cosigns.
“The issue is he skipped you.”
I stare at the screen.
He jumped from seeing me stressed to building a whole solution, and somewhere in the middle, he forgot to bring me with him.
I pick up my phone after we end the video call, and Javonte’s name is still sitting there on my screen.
Three missed calls.
Four texts.
The latest one says:
