Chapter 4

Sunny's Thai Kitchen smelled like lemongrass and fried garlic, and for one dizzy moment in the doorway, I could not breathe.

My mother used to cook with lemongrass. In the last weeks of the snow, I would have traded a year of my life for that smell.

"Abbie!" Dana was already waving from our usual booth by the window, her smile wide and warm and perfectly, horribly familiar. Garrett sat next to her. Next to her, not across. I wondered how many times I had seen that and called it nothing.

I made myself walk. One foot, then the other. I slid into the seat opposite them and smiled.

"Hey, you two."

"You look tired," Garrett said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. His palm was warm and dry and familiar. I let it rest there exactly as long as a normal girlfriend would, then reached for my water glass.

The old me would have held on. The new me wanted to scrub my skin raw.

Now that I knew, I saw everything.

I saw how Dana ordered for Garrett without asking: pad see ew, no sprouts, extra chili. I saw how his phone lay face down beside his plate, and how it buzzed once, and how he flipped it over with his thumb and smiled at the screen before pocketing it. I saw how Dana's knee did not quite move away from his under the table. I saw how they laughed at the same moments, a half beat before the joke ended, like people who had been practicing a language together in secret.

Four months. For four months I had cooked their favorite dinners. I had watched them "bonding" and felt glad. I had told people, with real warmth, "I'm so lucky they get along."

"So," Dana said, once the food arrived and she had arranged her face into something small and brave. "I have news. And it's kind of awful."

Here it came.

"My landlord's selling the building. I have until the end of the month to get out." Her eyes shone. She was very good at this. She always had been; I had just never been on the other side of it. "I don't even know what I'm going to do."

"Abbie has that big couch," Garrett said.

He did not look at me when he said it. He looked at Dana, and I saw the little exchange pass between them, quick as a card slipped up a sleeve.

This was the moment. I knew it the way you know a step is missing in the dark. In my first life, I had said, Of course you'll stay with me! before she finished crying. I had hugged her. I had been so proud of myself.

That couch was where she had kissed my boyfriend under my mother's quilt.

The silence stretched. Across the room, a waiter dropped a tray, and everyone flinched and laughed. I counted to five in the quiet, and in that quiet I heard my mother's voice, the real one, warm and worried and ten years ago: Abbie, you cannot pour from an empty cup.

"I can't, Dana," I said. "I'm so sorry."

Garrett blinked. "What?"

"My landlord's cracking down on guests. Anyone staying more than two nights and I could lose my lease." The lie came out smooth and flat, easy as breathing. "I really hope you find something fast."

Dana's smile flickered. It was only for a second, but I caught it: a hairline crack, and behind it, something calculating. "Even for a few weeks?"

"I wish I could."

"Since when do you say no?" Garrett asked. He was half laughing, but his eyes had sharpened. He was looking at me as if I were a familiar room in which someone had moved all the furniture.

"Since I looked at my bank account," I said pleasantly, and picked up my fork.

It was the longest dinner of my life. I ate every bite. I asked Dana about her job. I laughed at Garrett's story about his boss. I watched myself from somewhere above, an actress who had finally learned her lines.

When the check came, Garrett slid it toward me with two fingers, the way he had done a hundred times before, not even looking up.

I pulled out my phone and opened the calculator.

"Mine's seventeen fifty," I said. "With tip, twenty-one. Yours is thirty-four, Garrett, and Dana's nineteen." I set the exact amount on the table in cash and smiled. "Dinner was lovely."

Garrett stared at the receipt as if it were written in another language.

Outside, the night was warm and heavy with the smell of jasmine from the planters along the sidewalk. Garrett offered to walk me home. I told him I was exhausted, that work had been brutal, that I would call him tomorrow. He kissed my cheek and I let him.

I made it to the corner before my hands started to shake.

I stood under a streetlamp, gripping the strap of my bag, and the urge came up in me like nausea. I could go back. I could walk into that restaurant and put a whole plate of noodles in Garrett's lap. I could tell Dana, in front of everyone, what a quiet little thing I had overheard through a door that hadn't happened yet. I could watch his face fall apart.

It would feel wonderful for about eleven minutes.

Then what?

They would cry. They would lie. They would tell everyone that poor Abbie had had a breakdown, and they would watch me afterward with new, careful eyes. And in few days, when the cold came and they were hungry and desperate and I was the only person they knew who might still have something, they would remember exactly where I lived.

I let out a slow breath and watched it disappear in the warm air.

Revenge was a luxury for people who already had somewhere warm to stand.

I had died because I let other people decide whether I lived. That was the real wound, deeper than the affair, deeper than the stolen food. They had weighed me and found me light, and I had let them, because I had never built anything that could not be taken.

So no scenes. No speeches. No screaming match in a Thai restaurant.

The best revenge would be a door. A thick, locked, reinforced door, with me on the warm side of it, and them out in the snow with their empty hands. And when they finally came knocking, the answer would be mine to give. Not theirs. Never theirs again.

Never again, I thought. It felt like a vow, steady and quiet. Never again will anyone decide what I am worth.

I walked home . By the time I reached my building, I had made three decisions. I would keep seeing them, rarely, vaguely, a girlfriend buried in work. I would give them nothing, not my plans, not my address when I moved, not a single can of beans. And I would stop being the person who asked permission to survive.

The apartment was dim when I let myself in. I did not turn on the lights. I stood in the middle of the room with my keys still in my hand, and the air in front of me began to shimmer.

The pale blue panel drew itself into being, steady and unhurried, as if it had never left.

[Standby window: 06 hours, 21 minutes remaining.]

[Host has not confirmed activation.]

[Would you like to begin?]

I looked at that small pulsing icon for a long moment. I thought about snow, and taillights, and a hand tucking my hair behind my ear.

Then I set down my keys and answered.

"Begin."