Chapter Three: Someone Who Saw Him

Daniel laughed when I asked him about it, easy, unbothered, already reaching for his coffee. "Last night? Priya's lease finally came through. The agency wanted a guarantor, so I signed something around ten." It was a reasonable explanation, delivered in a reasonable tone, and I told myself it fit, except that Priya had thanked him for "last night" standing in my kitchen at four in the afternoon, hours before Daniel could have signed anything at ten that same night. I decided not to mention that part. Not yet. It went into the same growing pile as everything else I wasn't ready to say out loud.

Three weeks after that, I was sitting across from Sophie at the corner table of the café near her flower shop, and her cup went down without her drinking from it, which was the first thing that told me something was wrong. In fifteen years of friendship, Sophie Lang had never once let good coffee go cold out of politeness. Not through the divorce that took her almost two years to talk about out loud, not through the year her shop nearly folded, not even the day she found out her father wasn't going to make it to the wedding she'd been planning around him.

It was the same table we'd been meeting at since business school, back when neither of us could afford anything on the menu without splitting it. She'd been telling me about a wedding order gone wrong, peonies flown in from the wrong continent, and I'd been half-listening, running a list in my head that had gotten too long to hold without writing down, when she said it.

"I saw Daniel Tuesday, actually." She said it lightly, the way you'd mention running into someone at the grocery store. Then her face did the thing again, a flinch, quick and involuntary, like she'd let a door swing open she'd meant to keep shut.

Tuesday. The day his boarding pass said Chicago.

"Where?" I asked, too fast, too sharp for a casual conversation about flowers.

"I don't, I probably got the day wrong." She picked her cup back up, if only to have somewhere to put her hands. "It's not a big deal. Forget I said anything."

"Sophie."

She looked at me for a long moment, and whatever moved across her face wasn't quite guilt. It was closer to grief. "El. Can I ask you something, and you promise not to get mad?"

"Since when do you ask permission to ask me things?"

"Do you actually know who Daniel's become? Not the guy from the wedding toast. Him. Now." She wasn't smiling anymore, and neither of us had touched the pastry between us. "You've built your whole life around him. I watched what that did to my mother, and I swore I'd never let it happen to me, and I still let it happen to me anyway. I just don't want to watch it happen to you too."

I hadn't known that about her mother. Fifteen years, and there were still whole rooms in Sophie's life I'd never been let into, which made it harder, not easier, to understand why she was suddenly standing in the doorway of one of mine, warning me not to go further inside.

"What did you see on Tuesday, Sophie?"

"Nothing. I told you, I probably got it wrong." She was already gathering her bag, already halfway to standing, the conversation closing over itself like water finding its level again. "Forget I said anything, okay? I love you. That's all this is."

I brought it up to Daniel that night anyway, watching his face instead of listening to his answer.

"Sophie said she saw you Tuesday."

"Sophie?" He laughed, short and easy, already reaching for the remote like the question weighed nothing at all. "I haven't seen Sophie in, God, months. Since your birthday, maybe."

Months. Sophie hadn't said Tuesday like a woman recalling something from months back. She'd said it like it had happened four days ago and was still sitting behind her teeth.

I let it go out loud and kept it anyway, the way I was learning to do with most things now.

It was the following week, sitting at the kitchen table with the joint statement open on my laptop because somebody in this house had to actually pay the bills, that I found it. A recurring charge, once a month, going back fourteen months: Rosewood Florals. I'd never once received flowers from a shop by that name. I didn't recognize the amounts either, usually somewhere between two and four hundred dollars, an extravagant sum for flowers nobody in this house had ever seen delivered.

I typed the shop's name into a search bar before I could talk myself out of it. The website loaded slow, all soft pastels and a bio page with a photo I already half-knew before I clicked on it.

Owner: Sophie Lang.

I scrolled down through fourteen months of charges, something cold and specific settling into my chest, until I hit the most recent one. Three weeks ago. Not two hundred dollars. Not four hundred.

Two thousand two hundred.

I sat with that number for a long time before I closed the laptop, because two thousand two hundred dollars had nothing to do with flowers, and everything to do with a question I didn't yet know how to ask either of them.