Voice Memo

Jade's POV

The table had gone the way Lena needed it to go.

I could feel it happening in real time. The slight shift in how Talia was holding herself pulled back just enough to signal that she was no longer neutral. Leo looking between us with the uncomfortable expression of a host who did not want his weekend to become something that required managing.

Even Brooke, who knew me better than anyone at this table, had gone carefully quiet in the way she went quiet when she was waiting to understand something fully before she committed to a position.

Lena had not raised her voice once.

She had not needed to. She had simply told a story with one detail in it and let the detail do everything. A story that required no evidence because the image it created was its own evidence. Jade Ellis coming out of Hayes Calloway’s suite after midnight. Clean. Simple. Impossible to disprove with words alone.

She looked at me now across the breakfast table with the expression of a woman who had been genuinely hurt and was trying very hard to be gracious about it.

“I don’t want this to become a whole thing,” she said, softly enough that the people outside our immediate circle could not quite hear. “I just think we should be honest with each other. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Talia reached over and put her hand on Lena’s arm.

Brooke looked at me.

Lena’s eyes filled. Not dramatically. Just enough. The way a person cries who has had practice making it look involuntary. “After everything,” she said. “I just never thought you’d do something like this to me.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

Then I reached for my phone.

I had been a working designer for three years. I left voice memos for myself constantly. Fabric ideas, color notes, construction details, things that occurred to me at inconvenient moments that I needed to capture before they dissolved. I had been in the middle of one last night when Lena came to my lounger at the pool and sat on the edge of it and leaned close to say what she needed to say quietly enough that Leo and the others in the water would not overhear.

The memo had still been running.

I found it in the list. Forty two minutes long, the tail end of a recording that had started when I was walking from the hotel to the pool and had not stopped when Lena sat down beside me.

I turned the volume up.

My own voice came first, distant and muffled, saying something about a fabric weight I needed to revisit. Then the sound of water. Then the lounger shifting. Then Lena’s voice, low and close to the microphone, because she had leaned close to my bag when she leaned close to my ear.

Can I ask you something terrible?

The table went completely still.

My voice on the recording: What’s wrong?

My period came early. I’m completely unprepared, and I’ve already asked the hotel, and they don’t stock anything. My room is on the third floor. Suite 304. I have everything I need in there, but I can’t really walk through the hotel right now. A pause. Would you mind stopping at the gift shop on the way up and grabbing a box? They should have something basic.

Then my voice: Of course. Anything else you need?

Then Lena: You’re a lifesaver.

I stopped the recording.

The terrace was absolutely silent except for the sound of the ocean below the bluff and a gull somewhere out over the water.

I set my phone face down on the table.

Lena was not crying anymore. The expression on her face had changed into something I had not seen from her before, something stripped of the warmth and the careful softness, something underneath all of that which was quieter and harder and much more honest.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she looked at her coffee cup.

Talia had removed her hand from Lena’s arm. Leo was looking at the table. Brooke was looking at me with an expression that was not quite relief and not quite vindication and lived somewhere between the two.

“You gave me a room number,” I said. My voice was completely even. “I went to that room. It turned out to be Hayes’s room and not yours. I left within sixty seconds. That is the complete story.”

Nobody said anything.

I picked up my coffee cup and drank from it and looked out at the water over the railing of the terrace. It was a clear morning. The kind of Montauk morning that made the whole drive out feel worth it, the light coming off the ocean at the specific angle that made everything look cleaner than it actually was.

“Jade.”

I turned.

Hayes was standing at the terrace entrance.

I did not know how long he had been there. Long enough, from the look on his face. He was dressed and composed in the way he was always dressed and composed, like mornings cost him nothing, and he was looking at me with an expression I had not seen from him before. Not the blank registry of a stranger. Not the cold deliberate indifference he had been giving me for weeks.

Something else.

Something that lasted for exactly three seconds before he walked to the empty chair at the far end of the table, pulled it out, sat down, and reached for the coffee.

He looked at Lena once.

Then he poured his coffee and said nothing.

Lena picked up her napkin and set it in her lap with a precision that had nothing natural in it and looked at the ocean and did not speak again for the rest of the breakfast.

The table found a careful, tentative version of its morning after a while. Leo asked something about the drive back. Talia answered. Two other guests talked between themselves.

I ate what was in front of me.

I did not look at Hayes again.

But I was aware, in the unwilling way I was always aware of him, that he had not looked away from me for a very long time.