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What I’m thinking about, walking home with my shoulder aching and my breath showing and a rules summit on the calendar for Sunday, is that for about two hours in that booth I forgot it was a plan.
I don’t finish the thought.
I never do.
Chapter 12
Sloane
The doorbell goes at nine-forty on Sunday morning, and I know before I’m off the sofa.
I’m in the kitchen with coffee and the Sunday quiet — June’s still asleep, Wren’s at an early skate, Margo’s gone for a run she’ll narrate to us later in unsolicited detail — and the bell rings, two short presses, impatient, and something cold drops through me before I’ve assembled a single conscious thought about who it is.
I know the rhythm of that ring. I dated it for eight months.
I stand in the kitchen for a second with the coffee going lukewarm in my hands. The smart thing is not to answer. The smart thing is to text the girls and let it go to nobody and pretend I’m not home. But the car in the drive is mine, and the kitchen light is on, and Evan has always been very good at math when the math serves him, and not answering will only move the problem to a worse hour.
I set the coffee down.
I go to the door.
I open it the width of my own body and no more.
“Hey.” Evan’s on the porch in the grey quarter-zip, holding two coffees in a cardboard tray, and he’s done his face up in an expression I recognize — the open, wounded, reasonable one, the one that’s harder to fight than anger because anger at least gives you something to push against. “I brought you a coffee.”
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“Five minutes.” He lifts the tray a little, an offering. “That’s all. I just want to clear the air. We can’t — Sloane, we can’t just leave it like this.”
“We can. It’s actually very easy. You leave it, and then it’s left.”
“Please.” And he does the thing with his voice, the soft drop into earnest, and holds out one of the cups. “I got your order.”
I look at the cup.
It’s a flat white. I can see it through the little window in the lid, the flat pale surface of it. I have never once in my life ordered a flat white. I drink chai, or I drink black coffee when I need to stay upright, and I told him this — I know I told him this, more than once, the way you tell a person the small facts of yourself early on because you assume the telling matters — and eight months later, on a porch, performing the gesture of knowing me, he has brought me a drink I don’t drink.
A boy I met eight days ago got my order right because his eighty-two-year-old grandmother told him.
This one had eight months and brought me a flat white.
I don’t say any of that. I file it, the way I file everything, in the place where I keep the evidence I’m not going to use because using it would require caring more than I can afford to.
“I don’t want the coffee, Evan.”
He doesn’t leave.
Of course, he doesn’t leave. I didn’t expect him to leave. The whole architecture of Evan is that no is a thing that happens early in a negotiation, a position to be worked, and he’s already shifting his weight, already finding the next angle, and I stand in my doorway in socks with the cold coming in around my ankles and I think, distantly, that I am so tired. Not scared. Tired. A bone-deep, four-week, eight-month tired that lives under the composure and has lived there so long I’ve stopped registering it as a separate thing.
“I heard about Friday,” he says.
There it is.
“You went to the bar. With the hockey team.” A small laugh, not a real one. “With Sorensen.”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your—”
“Come on, Sloane.” He tilts his head, and now there’s something underneath the reasonable, the first thread of it. “Sorensen? Really? You hate guys like that. You’ve spent the whole time I’ve known you talking about how athletes are — what was it — the human embodiment of every bad decision. That’s a direct quote. That’s you. And now you’re at The Penalty Box on a Friday night with the entire hockey team like some —” he stops himself, recalibrates, softens “— like that’s who you are now. It’s not who you are. I know who you are.”
