Chapter 3: He made you coffee?

DAISY ❀

I knew someone might hear me.

That was the thing about grief,  it didn’t wait for convenient moments. It came when the lights were off and the apartment was quiet and there was nothing left to distract you from the size of the absence.

 I had held it together through the drive, through tea with Ivy, through Dexter and his lipstick and his territorial comments about the furniture. I had held it through dinner and through the small talk and through all the ordinary motions of a person who was fine.

But the moment I closed my bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, I cried uncontrollably. 

I pressed my face into the pillow before the sound could get out. Let it move through me in waves hot and silent and exhausting, with my fingers gripping the pillowcase and my shoulders shaking with the effort of keeping it contained. My mother’s face. My father’s smile. The way the house sounded now without either of them in it.

I cried until there was nothing left to cry and then I lay there, hollowed out and quiet, staring at the dark ceiling.

Then I heard footsteps in the corridor.

I moved fast, wiped my face with the back of my hand, rolled onto my side and pulled the blanket up to my shoulder. My breathing was still uneven but I evened it out deliberately, the way you do when you are performing sleep for someone who might check on you. The footsteps slowed outside my door.

No knock.

I waited. Ten minutes passed and nothing came, no voice, no tap of knuckles on wood. I exhaled slowly. Probably the house staff doing their last rounds before bed. I sat up, rubbed my face and went to the bathroom.

I was halfway through washing my face, cold water running over my palms, when the knock came.

Soft. Two taps.

I grabbed my towel from the hanger and pressed it to my face. “Who is it?”

Silence. No answer.

That was Ivy’s habit  knocking and then standing there waiting for you to open the door like the knock was just a formality. I dried my face quickly, checked myself in the mirror to make sure the evidence had cleared and went to open the door.

“Girl,” I said, pulling it open. “I thought you’d be sleeping by now” 

I stopped. I looked at the empty corridor. Then down at the floor.

A mug. Still steaming. Set carefully just outside the door.

I looked both ways down the corridor but whoever left it was already gone. I picked it up and held it in both hands, chamomile, by the smell of it  and stood in the doorway for a moment feeling something I couldn’t quite name settle in my chest.

I took it inside.

Twenty minutes later Ivy knocked properly and walked in without waiting for an answer, which was also her habit. She was in her pajamas with her phone in her hand and the bright, restless energy of someone who had been scrolling on TikTok for hours.

“I thought you’d be out by now,” she said, dropping onto the end of my bed.

“I can’t sleep,” I said, which was true enough. I had been sitting against the headboard with the empty mug and my thoughts and the particular silence that follows a long cry.

“Did you hear,” Ivy said, crossing her legs and holding up her phone, “about the makeup artist who used that insanely expensive foundation on a client’s face?”

I grabbed onto the topic with both hands. “The six hundred dollar one? I saw that.”

“Six to eight hundred,” Ivy corrected, eyes wide. “And she won the trend. She actually won it. I was so happy for her.”

“She deserved it,” I said. “The audacity alone.”

Ivy laughed and I laughed and for a few minutes it was just two women on a bed talking about foundation prices and TikTok drama and absolutely nothing heavy. I felt my shoulders come down from somewhere near my ears.

Then the silence settled between us comfortably this time, not hollow, and I looked at her.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For real, Ivy. I feel better than I did a week ago. Just being here helps.”

She didn’t say anything back. She just leaned over and pulled me into a hug  slowly, certain, the kind that meant I’ve got you without needing to say it. I let her hold it for a moment before she pulled back, tucked her feet under her and reached for the television remote.

We talked until our words started slurring. Somewhere around 2am we both drifted off, the TV still going quietly in the background, Ivy’s phone face down on the pillow between us.

I woke up with a headache behind my eyes that felt like punishment.

Ivy was already gone from the bed, her side cool, her pillow dented. I lay there for a moment pressing my fingers to my temple before I accepted that sleep was done and got up. I dressed slowly, chose comfort clothes and made my way downstairs holding the stairs railing with more dependency than I would usually admit. 

Dexter was at the dining table.

Already dressed for work, he was in a dark suit, no tie yet, jacket over the back of the chair. He had a cup of tea in front of him and his phone flat on the table and he looked like someone who had been awake for hours without the inconvenience of showing it. I raised a hand in his general direction.

“Good morning,” he said. His voice was even. No edge in it.

“Morning,” I said, and it came out smaller than I intended. I pulled out a chair and sat down and rested my chin in my hand and waited for Ivy to appear from the kitchen.

I heard the clatter of Ivy starting breakfast. I closed my eyes briefly against the light coming through the window.

Then something slid across the table toward me.

A mug. Black coffee, no sugar, the temperature just right. I opened my eyes.

Dexter was already looking back down at his phone.

“Drink it,” he said, without looking up. “It’ll help with the headache.”

I stared at the mug. Then at him. His face gave nothing away, no smugness, no critic of generosity, just a man looking at his phone like he hadn’t just done anything worth noting. 

But he knew. He knew I had a headache and there was only one way he could have known.

He had heard me last night.

The thought sat in my chest quietly. I wrapped both hands around the mug and took a slow sip. It was exactly what I needed: strong, slightly bitter, grounding in the particular way that only coffee at the right moment can be.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded once. Then he picked up his car keys from the counter, slid his jacket on without hurry and walked out the front door.

I sat there with the mug and stared at the space he had just left.

“Oh wow.”

Ivy was standing in the kitchen doorway with a spatula in her hand and her mouth open.

I turned around. “What?”

“He made you coffee.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “He did.”

“Daisy.” She came to the table and sat down across from me with the particular expression she wears when something has genuinely surprised her. “Dexter has never made coffee for anyone. Not even me.”

I looked at her. Then back at the mug in my hands.

“Not once?” I said.

“Not once,”she said.

I took another slow sip and said nothing. But something about the warmth of the mug felt different now, less like coffee and more like a question I didn’t have an answer to yet.

 I was still thinking about it an hour later when I went upstairs and passed his bedroom door. It was slightly open. On the floor just inside his room, folded neatly, was the throw blanket from the living room couch. The one that had been on my shoulders when I fell asleep there the night before last night I came to their house.

He had put it back himself.