Don’t Lie To Me After

“She held your hand.”

Elliot set his phone face down on his desk without looking up. “Nicole.”

“Don’t say my name like that.” She stepped further into his office, her heels sharp against the marble floor. “I was there, Elliot. I saw it. You held her hand walking into that building and you did not let go.”

He leaned back in his chair slowly. Outside the floor to ceiling windows, the city moved the way it always did. Indifferent. Continuous. He had always found that comforting. Right now it was just noise.

“It was a business event,” he said. “She was there as my wife.”

“She IS your wife.” Nicole’s voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. Just enough. “That is exactly the problem.”

He looked at her then.

She was beautiful in the way she had always been beautiful. Composed and sharp and put together in a way that had once made him feel like he was winning something just by being near her. Right now she looked tired. Not physically. The deeper kind. The kind that lives behind the eyes and does not go away with sleep.

“The sixty days are almost half over,” he said.

“And then what?” She moved closer, stopping at the edge of his desk. “She signs and disappears and we go back to what exactly? Because I have been waiting, Elliot. I have been waiting for three years for you to choose me fully and I am starting to think that is never going to happen.”

He did not answer.

That was answer enough.

Nicole laughed. It was not a happy sound. “You don’t even realize it yet, do you?”

“Nicole.”

“She is going to leave and you are going to let her and then one day you will wake up and understand exactly what you lost.” She picked up her bag from the chair beside her. Her hands were steady. He had always respected that about her. She never let him see the full damage. “I’m taking Zara to my mother’s this weekend. Don’t call unless it is about her.”

She walked out.

The door did not slam. That was worse somehow.

Elliot sat in the quiet of his office and stared at the contract on his desk that he had not read a single word of in the last forty minutes. He picked up his phone. Opened it. Closed it again.

He did not know who he was thinking of calling.

That was the part that unsettled him.

Sera was on the kitchen floor when he got home.

Not crying. Not collapsed. She was sitting cross legged in front of the open cabinet under the sink, a flashlight in one hand and a wrench in the other, her hair pulled up in a messy knot, a small grease mark on her left cheek.

He stopped in the doorway.

“Pipe is leaking,” she said without turning around. She already knew it was him from the sound of his shoes. Four years had taught her things she had never asked to learn. “I called the building manager. He said two days. I said no.”

“You know how to fix pipes.”

“I know how to do a lot of things.” She adjusted something inside the cabinet. A sound of water stopping. Then she sat back and looked at her work with the calm satisfaction of someone who did not need to be congratulated. “There.”

She stood up, wiped her hands on a small towel she had tucked into her waistband, and turned to face him.

She looked at him the way she had been looking at him lately. Not with longing. Not with anger. With a kind of clear, level attention that he was finding increasingly difficult to stand in front of. Like she was reading something written on him that he could not see himself.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not being mean. You look like you haven’t eaten since this morning.” She moved to the refrigerator, opened it, and pulled out a container without asking. “Sit down.”

“Sera, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” She was already at the stove. “I want to. There is a difference. Learn it.”

He sat down.

He was not sure why. He had not planned to. His body made the decision before his mind caught up and by the time he registered it he was already at the kitchen table watching her move through the kitchen with the kind of ease that came from a thousand quiet evenings he had never once been present for.

She placed a bowl in front of him ten minutes later. Sat across from him. Folded her hands on the table.

“Nicole came to your office today,” she said.

It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“Is she alright?”

He looked up. Of all the things she could have asked. Of all the ways she could have used that information. She asked if Nicole was alright.

“Why do you care?” he asked. He did not mean it harshly. He genuinely wanted to know.

Sera looked at him for a moment. Something moved in her eyes. Not pain exactly. More like patience. The kind that had been tested so many times it had become a permanent part of her face.

“Because she is a person,” Sera said simply. “And she is raising a child alone. And whatever she did or did not do, she did not build this situation by herself.” She paused. “Neither did I.”

The words landed quietly.

He picked up his spoon. Ate. The food was warm and simple and better than anything he had ordered at the dinner last night with two Michelin stars and a waiting list of six months.

He did not say that out loud.

“Dr. Cole called me again,” Sera said.

He went still.

“She wants to meet in person this time. She says what she has cannot be discussed over the phone.” Sera’s voice was steady. Completely steady. But her hands, he noticed, had moved to her lap under the table. “She used the word urgent.”

He set his spoon down.

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.” Sera looked at him directly. “She asked if you would come.”

The air in the kitchen shifted.

He did not know what Adaeze Cole had found. He did not know what she was carrying or how heavy it was or who it was going to destroy when she finally put it down on a table between them. But the look on Sera’s face told him one thing clearly.

Whatever it was, it was going to change everything.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

Sera nodded once. She stood, picked up her bowl, and carried it to the sink. She rinsed it herself. She was almost out of the kitchen when she stopped.

She did not turn around.

“Elliot.” Her voice was quiet. Careful in a way it had not been with him in a very long time. “Whatever she tells us tomorrow. I need you to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

A pause. Long enough that he held his breath without meaning to.

“Don’t lie to me after.”

She walked out before he could answer.

And Elliot sat alone at the kitchen table, her words still hanging in the air, suddenly and completely afraid of what tomorrow morning was going to cost him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​