SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 41 - チャプター 50

It came on a Saturday. Not dramatically, the significant things rarely arrived with the fanfare they deserved. This one arrived as a text from Jade at eleven in the morning while I was at the West Village location going over the April menu with Maya and arguing pleasantly about whether lavender belonged in a tart or was fundamentally a soap flavor. Jade: Call me when you have a sec. Not urgent but call me. The 'but' was doing considerable work in that sentence. I excused myself from the lavender debate — which Maya was winning, for the record, her argument about restraint and proportion being the kind of argument that was correct even when you didn't want it to be and went to the back room and called Jade. She picked up on the second ring. "Hey," she said, and the quality of her voice told me immediately that whatever this was, it was something she had been sitting with for a few hours already. "What happened?" I said. A pause. "Marcus didn't tell you." It wasn't a

The thing about Isabelle being in New York was that it changed the air pressure. Not dramatically. Not in any way that was visible or nameable on a given Tuesday or Thursday. But the city was smaller than it pretended to be Manhattan especially, which spread itself across an island and performed enormousness while actually being a collection of neighborhoods that overlapped and intersected in ways that made complete avoidance of any given person essentially a full-time project. Isabelle was in Midtown. The Calloway brownstone was on the Upper East Side. The West Village bakery was, as the name suggested, in the West Village. These were not, geographically, the same place. And yet. --- It was Patricia who invited her to Sunday dinner. I had known it was coming, Jade had warned me, Marcus had warned me, and my own knowledge of Patricia Calloway after eight years of Sunday dinners had told me independently that the invitation was not a matter of if but of when. Patricia

The second lunch happened on a Tuesday. I found out about it the same way I found out about the first one from Marcus, directly, that evening over the phone. This was, I understood, the thing about him that made everything simultaneously easier and harder: he told me. Not because I asked, not because he had been caught, but because he had decided months ago that honesty was the thing he owed me and he was incapable of setting that down even when the honest thing was inconvenient. "She called this morning," he said. "She had a gap between depositions and asked if I wanted to grab something. I said yes." I was at the West Village location doing end-of-day prep when he called. The closing routine covering the cases, wiping the counters, the methodical wind-down of a day's work continued around the phone call with the automatic efficiency of something my hands knew without instruction. "How was it?" I said. "Good." A pause. "She's — she's doing better than last week. The case is

He didn't cancel that week. He came to the bakery on Thursday, back door, eight forty-seven, coffee from the Atlantic place and sat at the kitchen counter while I worked the morning prep and we talked about ordinary things with the careful attention of two people who had said something significant on the phone three days ago and hadn't yet decided what to do with it in person. The 'I don't know' sat in the kitchen with us. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just present, the way difficult things were present when they hadn't been resolved occupying space without announcing themselves, the way a change in air pressure occupied a room before a storm. He was warm. He was present. He covered my hand briefly when I set his coffee refill on the counter and the touch was the same touch it had always been warm and certain and entirely deliberate. And yet. The yet was still there. --- I didn't push. This was a conscious decision, made in the Cobble Hill kitchen at five in the morni

He didn't come the following Thursday. No text ahead. No explanation. Just the absence of the bell above the door at eight forty-seven and the window table sitting empty in the April morning with the particular emptiness of something expected that hadn't arrived. I made the tart anyway. Not for him, or not only for him. The brown sugar bourbon tart was on the menu and the menu existed independently of Marcus Calloway's Thursday attendance record and I was a professional person running a professional establishment and the tart went in the case at nine-fifteen regardless. Dorothy got the first slice. She said it was excellent. I thanked her and went back to work. --- He texted at noon. Marcus: I'm sorry about this morning. Something came up. I looked at the message for a moment. Something came up. Three words that could mean anything and therefore meant something specific. The specific vagueness of a person who had something to say and hadn't figured out how to sa