One near-miss in a kitchen is not a pattern.
I tell myself that.
I put the coffee pot down and go find my manuscript and I sit at the kitchen table after Phoenix has gone upstairs and I open it to the chapter I've been stuck on for a week. My protagonist has just done the thing that can't be taken back—she told the truth in front of witnesses, just like I told James at the café. The book started moving after that.
The problem is what comes next. After the truth. After the witnesses. The book is asking me what happens when you'veblown the safe version of your life apart and you're standing in the rubble and the person you love most is somewhere else.
I sit with the cursor blinking for a long time.
Then I start writing and what comes out surprises me. It’s not the scene I planned, not the safe version of the next chapter, but the one where she stops waiting for him to come back.
I don't know yet what that looks like for me.
I write it for her and it feels true so I keep going. An hour passes, maybe more. The house is quiet around me, just the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the floors settling. I don't look up until I hear Phoenix on the stairs—his particular footfall, the third step that always sounds louder than the rest—and then I close the laptop and sit back and look at the dark window and think about what telling the truth actually costs. Whether I'm ready to find out.
He comes into the kitchen and stops when he sees me still at the table.
"Hey," he says. His voice is different this late, softer at the edges, the controlled version of him finally offline for the night.
"Hey," I say.
He looks at me for a moment. Then he crosses to where I'm sitting and puts his hand on the back of my neck, warm and deliberate, then bends down and presses his lips to the top of my head. He stays there for a second.
I reach up and cover his hand with mine.
We stay like that for a moment in the quiet kitchen with the manuscript open on the table between us and everything I haven't said yet still waiting in the room.
Then he straightens. Fills his glass at the tap. Comes back and sits across from me.
"How's the book?" he asks.
I look at him. This is the real version of him, the one that comes out after midnight when the phone is upstairs and his guard is down.
"It's finding its way," I say.
He nods and says, “good.”
And for tonight, that's enough.
17
JADE
Imade dinner at seven. By eight-thirty the pasta was cold and I'd stopped pretending I was going to reheat it. I poured a glass of wine instead and sat at the table and listened to the house settle around me and told myself it wasn't a big deal, which is something I've been telling myself a lot lately.
Phoenix comes in at nine-fifteen. I hear his bag hit the floor in the hall, his jacket over the chair, the specific sound of him checking his phone before he's even properly through the door. When he comes into the kitchen and sees the table—the two plates, the candle I lit at seven and blew out at eight—something moves across his face that looks like genuine guilt.
"I'm sorry," he says. "The meeting ran long."
"They always do," I say, and I mean it to come out neutral and it doesn't quite.
He looks at me. He's tired. I can see it in the line of his shoulders, still half in whatever the meeting was about. He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down and looks at the cold pasta.
"I'll heat it up," he says.
"It's fine."
"Jade—"
