"An hour. Maybe more. I wasn't tracking it."
Her mouth goes still on the lie.
I don't push. I sit on the edge of her desk beside her chair and bump her shoulder with my knee. "You eating tonight? I'm making the bolognese."
"I have a deadline."
"You always have a deadline. Seven. Elm House."
"Fine." Then, softer, "What time?"
"I just said. Seven."
I go home and start the sauce. Onions first, then garlic.
They had sex.
The knife stops mid-cut. My chest tightens so hard the kitchen narrows to the blade, the garlic, my hand hovering above the board.
I set the knife down before I do something stupid and press both palms flat to the counter.
Breathe.
Dante's fake fine. His wrong shoulders. His refusal to meet my eyes.
Maya's broken gaze. Her pre-built sentences. The speed ofWhat did Dante do?before she even asked if practice went well.
The hour-plus silence between my text and Dante's response. The mark on his jaw. Four faint points of pressure where a hand gripped his face.
Nine years of knowing her.
I was thirteen when my father drove four hours through the dark with me in the back seat and came back with a woman and a girl who carried a garbage bag for a suitcase and had eyes that trusted nothing in the car.
I touched her once. We were seventeen. Summer. Her bedroom with the door locked, my mouth between her legs, the sounds she made while I knelt on the carpet at the foot of her bed. Once. I stopped. I closed the door. I went to my room. We never talked about it.
Five years of carrying the memory of those sounds into every bed I've been in since. Five years of knowing exactly what Maya Maddox sounds like when she stops managing.
Dante. The man who called her a tourist, who called her a parasite, who bought her specific brand of tea and hid it on my shelf. The knife handle bites into my palm.
Because I sent him.
I asked him to go to her apartment. I put his name in a text and pressed send and went back to my meeting. And while I sat in a conference room talking about athletic department budgets, his mouth was on hers.
I know it the way I know where the puck is going before it leaves the blade. His jaw. Her voice. The hour he didn't answer. I can't stop fucking reading it.
My eyes sting. I press the heel of my hand against them. My jaw locks hard enough to make my teeth ache. My fingers are white on the edge of the counter.
I pick the knife back up and dice the garlic. My hand is steady even if nothing else is. The garlic becomes paste under the blade. I scrape it into the pan, and the sizzle fills the kitchen.
The sauce simmers while I stir.
Maya arrives at seven. She brings wine, a bottle of red, nothing expensive. She sets it on the counter and looks at the stove.
"Smells good," she says.
"Sit down."
She takes the counter stool with her back to the wall. She's wearing my hoodie, the gray one with the split seam, the one she took from the back of the couch three weeks ago. Her hair is down, tucked behind one ear, and the hoodie collar has slipped to show the line of her collarbone.
