CHAPTER 11:The Buzzer

It was an ordinary Wednesday.

She had been home an hour.

Changed into his hoodie — the grey

one, the one she had taken somewhere around week two and which

had quietly stopped being his and started being hers without either of

them acknowledging the transfer. Wine she had been promising

herself since her three o'clock. Feet up. The particular comfortable

tiredness of a day that had gone well.

Damien was cooking. She could hear him in the kitchen — his

music low, something sizzling, the occasional sound of him opening

the fridge and closing it again. The apartment smelled like garlic and

something warm and she was in the middle of deciding whether to tell

him it smelled good or whether she would just let him figure out from

her expression at dinner.

She was halfway through her wine when the buzzer went.

He came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a cloth and

looked at the intercom screen and something changed in his face. Not

dramatically. Just — a stillness that was different from his usualstillness. A slight recalibration, like a person who has just seen

something they were not expecting and is deciding in real time how to

respond to it.

She noticed. Of course she noticed.

He pressed the intercom. "Who is it."

Not even a question. Flat.

The voice that came back was female and clear and carried the

particular confidence of someone who had never once been told they

were not welcome.

It's me. Buzz me up.

The silence after that was about four seconds. She counted.

He buzzed the door.

She looked at him. He looked at the intercom. Then he looked at

her and something in his expression was careful in a way it never

usually was with her.

"Who is that?" she said.

"Jade," he said.

Just the name. Like she was supposed to know it. Like it

explained something."Who is Jade?" she said,

though some part of her — the part that

had been paying attention since the beginning, the part that had

learned to read the particular quality of his silences — already

understood the shape of the answer.

"Someone I was with," he said. "Before."

Before. Neat word. Covered a lot of ground.

"How long before?" she said.

"We ended about eighteen months ago."

She nodded once. Looked at her wine. Put it down on the coffee

table with more precision than was necessary.

"And she is coming here," Olivia said.

"I didn't know she was coming," he said, and she believed him —

she could tell the difference between Damien being evasive and

Damien being caught off guard — but believing him did not make the

knock at the door, when it came thirty seconds later, any easier to

hear.

Jade Carter was beautiful in the way that some women are beautiful

— completely, effortlessly, as though it requires no maintenance and

has simply always been the case. Tall. Dark coat. The kind ofcomposure that came from knowing exactly what she looked like

walking into a room.

She looked at Damien first. Then she looked at Olivia.

The look lasted about two seconds. It took in everything — the

hoodie, the wine, the feet that had been up on the sofa, the specific

quality of Olivia's presence in the apartment that was not the presence

of a guest.

Then she smiled.

"I didn't realise you had company," she said, to Damien, very

pleasantly.

"Jade," he said. His voice was even. "What are you doing here."

"I was in the area." She stepped inside without being invited.

Looked around the apartment with the ease of someone reacquainting

herself with a space she had spent time in before.

"I've been trying to

call."

"I know."

"You haven't been picking up."

"I know that too."

She set her bag down on the kitchen counter — his kitchen

counter, the one Olivia made coffee at every morning — and turnedback to face them both with an expression that was warm and open

and doing a great deal of work.

Olivia stood up.

She did it quietly and without announcement, the way she did

most things, and she picked up her wine and she smiled at Jade. a professional smile, the neutral one, the one that gave nothing away —

and she said she would give them some space.

"You don't have to—" Damien started.

"It's fine," she said.

She walked to the bathroom and closed the door and stood at the

sink and looked at herself in the mirror and breathed.

Through the door she could hear them talking. Not the words —

just the rhythm. The particular back-and-forth of two people who

have history, who have a shorthand, who have been in rooms together

enough times that the silence between sentences means something.

She turned on the tap and let the water run cold over her wrists.

She was a therapist. She understood exactly what was happening

inside her chest right now. She could name it, trace it, explain the

neurological basis for the specific tightening she was feeling.

None of that helped even slightly.She turned off the tap.

She dried her hands.

She stood in the bathroom of a man's apartment wearing his

hoodie and listened to his ex-girlfriend's voice through the door and

had, for the first time in a long time, absolutely no idea what to do

next.

End of chapter 11