Chapter 3

ISLA pov

Nora was already at the table when I got there, two coffees ordered, hers black and mine drowning in enough syrup to embarrass a teenager, which she found hilarious and I stopped being embarrassed about around year three of this friendship.

"You look tired." She slid my cup over. "Good tired or bad tired?"

"Mabel's face-painting booth is apparently a two-person job now, so mostly just tired-tired." I wrapped both hands around the cup. "How was your weekend?"

"Boring. Josh's parents visited. I aged four years." She stirred her coffee even though there was nothing in it to stir. "How's Julian? Still living at airports?"

"Denver this week."

Something crossed her face, quick, there and gone, the kind of thing you miss if you weren't already looking for reasons to look for things. "Denver. Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing, it's dumb." She waved it off, laughed a little at herself. "I could've sworn I saw him Tuesday. Downtown, that steakhouse on Fifth, the one with the ridiculous valet line. I was walking past and saw a guy who looked exactly like him going in."

"Tuesday he was in Denver." I said it easy, the way you correct someone about a restaurant reservation. "Whole day. He called me from the hotel that night."

"Then it wasn't him." She shrugged, drank her coffee, and if I hadn't spent the last two weeks with my nerves rubbed raw, I would've believed the shrug completely. "My eyes are garbage lately anyway, I saw my own neighbor's dog and thought it was a coyote last week."

I laughed because it was funny, and I was already opening my mouth to ask what the guy had been wearing, some detail that would settle it one way or the other in my head, when her phone buzzed hard against the table, and she grabbed it fast enough that her coffee nearly went over.

"Sorry…. it's Josh, his mom's asking about flights, I have to.." She was already standing, phone to her ear, mouthing ‘one second’ at me, and by the time she sat back down ten minutes later we were talking about something else entirely, and I never got the chance to circle back.

I told myself it didn't matter. A stranger at a steakhouse. Nora's terrible eyesight. It matters exactly as much as you decide to let it matter, and for two days I decided it didn't matter at all.

Then I called her Thursday, just to ask, casually, the kind of question you slip into the middle of a conversation about something else so it doesn't sound like what it is.

"Hey, that guy at the steakhouse. What was he wearing?"

There was a pause on the line, long enough that I noticed it. "Isla, why does this matter?"

"It doesn't, I'm just curious."

"You're not just curious." Her voice had changed, gone careful in a way I never heard from her, not in twelve years of friendship. "Look. Can I say something, and you won't get mad?"

"Nora."

"I need you to actually hear this, okay? Don't just wait for me to finish talking." A breath. "You used to notice everything. You used to walk into a room and clock every detail before anyone said a word to you. And now I feel like… I don't know. Like you've trained yourself not to see things. Because seeing them would be inconvenient."

"That's not fair."

"Maybe not. I'm just asking if you actually know Julian anymore, or if you know the version of him that's easiest to live with."

My hand had gone tight around the phone. "Did you see something or not, Nora? Just tell me."

"I don't know what I saw." Flat now, retreating. "It was two seconds through a car window. Forget I said anything. I shouldn't have brought it up in the first place."

"You can't say all that and then tell me to forget it."

"Watch me." And there was almost a laugh in it, an attempt to make it lighter than it was, badly executed. "I have to go, Josh needs the car. Love you. Talk tomorrow."

She hung up before I could push further, and I stood there in my kitchen holding a dead phone, thinking that in twelve years, Nora Bellamy had never once told me to forget something she'd said. She usually doubled down. She usually made you sit through the whole opinion whether you wanted it or not.

Julian got home that night before Mabel's bedtime, tie already off, tired in the ordinary way of a man who'd been in meetings all day, and over dinner I brought it up the way you toss something small into a conversation to see if it lands wrong.

"Nora says hi, by the way."

"Nora Bellamy?" He said it like he was placing the name, which struck me as strange, because you don't have to place the name of someone you've known for years. "God, how is she? Haven't seen her in months."

I set my fork down slower than I meant to.

"Months," I said.

"Yeah, since… I don't know, that barbecue at your parents' place, maybe? Feels like forever." He said it easily, reaching for the salad, completely unbothered, a man commenting on the weather. "Why, is she good?"

"She's good," I said, and I heard myself say it, and some part of me was already somewhere else entirely, running the math on a Tuesday and a steakhouse and a man Nora swore looked exactly like him, next to a husband sitting across from me insisting he hadn't laid eyes on her since a barbecue that happened back in June.

Two people. One of them was lying to me. I just didn't know which one anymore, and for the first time since all of this started, that scared me more than either answer on its own.