Semua Bab I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Bab 11 - Bab 20

Three days. That was the first I was hearing about any trip to Chicago. I sat in the living room after he walked into the bedroom and turned that over in my mind. Not with surprise exactly — Rhett hiding things was not news, it had been the architecture of our marriage from the beginning — but with the specific irritation of a woman who had just been handed an ultimatum about a trip she hadn't even known was happening until the ultimatum arrived with it. He was going to Chicago. He had known for long enough to pack. He had told Ashley before he told me — or maybe he had not told Ashley either, maybe she had known because she was the kind of person who knew Rhett's schedule in ways that a best friend had no particular reason to. I filed that too. I stood up from the sofa and picked up the water glasses from the table and walked to the kitchen because standing still in that living room was not something I was willing to do for another minute. --- I was halfway up the stairs when I

"You know what?" I said. He looked up from the book. "If you were not going to tell me the whole thing, you should not have said anything at all." I kept my voice level. I was mostly succeeding. "I told you it was fine to keep it private. I told you that before you said a word. You chose to say something anyway and then stopped halfway through and walked away like that was a complete answer." He closed the book. "I'm just saying," I continued, "that half an answer is worse than no answer. It's worse because now I have a piece of something that doesn't make sense without the rest of it, and you're sitting there with the rest of it like it belongs to you, and it doesn't — it was a conversation that involved me and I had a right to either all of it or none of it. Not the middle." I stopped. The room was quiet. I was aware, at the back of my mind, that my voice had climbed slightly from where I had intended it to stay. Not raised exactly. Higher than usual. The difference between a

He came back into the living room. I had not moved from where I was standing. I should have. I had had approximately forty-five seconds while he was in the kitchen to relocate myself somewhere that was not the exact spot where he had just asked me what I wanted and received the most evasive non-answer I had ever produced in my life. Forty-five seconds was enough time to cross a room. To sit down. To pick up something that looked like I had a reason to be holding it. I had not done any of those things. So when he came back and stopped a few feet away I was still standing there like a woman who had not quite finished deciding something, which was accurate, and I did not particularly want it to be readable, which it clearly was. "You didn't answer me," he said. "I told you. Breakfast." "Before that." "I answered you." "You deflected." He tilted his head slightly. "There's a difference." I straightened. "What I want from you, Evan, is respect. That's it. You are staying in my home

Evan had been gone since morning. I knew because the apartment had a different quality when he was not in it — not emptier exactly, more like it stopped holding its breath. I had noticed this around day four and had chosen not to examine it too carefully because the things you examine too carefully have a way of becoming things you have to deal with. I worked through the afternoon. Real work this time — Cayla's case files spread across the study desk, deposition notes, financial records that needed cross-referencing before Friday. The kind of focused, detailed work that had always been the most reliable way to silence everything else. It worked. Mostly. --- Across the city, Evan's phone buzzed at half past twelve. His mother. *I'm near campus. Meet me at the cafeteria. Won't take long.* He stared at the message for a moment. Ashley's version of casual — the breezy tone, the *won't take long*, the way she framed everything as a minor thing so that saying no felt disproportionate

My phone rang at half past two. Evan's name on the screen. I looked at it for a second before I picked up, which was new. A week ago I would have answered without thinking. Now there was a second. A small one. But it was there. "Hey," I said. "Hey." His voice was easy. Campus noise behind him — footsteps, distant conversation, the particular hum of a place full of people going somewhere. "You got them." "I got them." I looked across the living room to where the peonies sat on the kitchen counter, pale pink against the white tile. "Thank you. You didn't have to do that." "I know." "The note was enough." "The flowers felt more honest," he said. I didn't have an answer for that so I let it sit. "How did you know?" I asked. "Know what?" "The peonies. I never told you." A brief pause. "You have a print on the wall in the study. Botanical. Peonies, top left corner. And there's a candle on your bathroom shelf — peony and white tea. And when we passed the flower stand on Tuesday yo