I stood at the kitchen counter and drank the coffee. Dutch had told me to find him when I was ready. I wasn’t ready. I went back to my room. I picked up the wrapper with two fingers, looked at it. Looked at the lingerie. Looked at the bed.
I didn’t remember any of it.
Not one second.
I picked up Bea’s note.
Keeping my promise. Call me when you wake up. I love you.
She had been here. She’d held me while I fell apart. Stayed until I was asleep and then left - because I’d asked her to,because Danny’s mother was alone and that mattered more than her own need to stay. She’d written me a note and set it where I’d find it when I woke up because that was who she was. She always puts everyone else first.
I folded the note up very small and put it in my pocket.
Glitch’s security room was at the back of the building, past the storage lockers, behind a door with a keypad. I’d been in there enough times over the years to know the code. Glitch was territorial about his equipment, but he wasn’t there.
I sat down in his chair.
The system was straightforward once you knew it. Multiple cameras on a loop, archived by timestamp. I went to the hallway feed outside my room and dragged back through the night.
I found it at 2:14 AM.
A woman. Coming out of my room. She was adjusting the strap of her dress, her hair the way Bea’s got when we’d been tangled up in each other for hours. She paused in the corridor, looked both ways, and walked toward the main room.
I watched it twice.
Then I watched the four seconds before she appeared — the door swinging inward from inside, a hand briefly visible at the edge of the frame, nothing else.
She was facing away from the camera when she adjusted the strap. I got a partial profile. Young. Dark hair. I didn’t recognize her.
I watched it a third time.
I don’t know what I’d been hoping to find — some alternative explanation, some different version of events that meant what I suspected wasn’t what had happened. There wasn’t one. There was just a woman I didn’t know, leaving my room at 2:14 in the morning. A condom wrapper by my bed. A bed that had seen some fucking action. And nothing in my memory to fill the hours.
The timestamp on the footage said 2:14 AM. Bea had been in that room earlier — holding me, staying until I was under, then leaving because I’d asked her to. She’d been gone for hours by the time that woman walked out of my door. Whatever had happened in that room had happened after she left.
I made it to the bathroom just in time.
I sat on the floor for a while after, my back against the cold metal partition, waiting for my hands to stop shaking. The clubhouse was starting its morning outside — boots on the floor, someone’s phone, the coffee machine rattling through its cycle. Normal sounds. The day just starting. Normal.
Danny had been dead for less than twenty-four hours.
This was what I’d done with that.
Bea’s note was still in my pocket.
I love you.
Years of watching her. Six months of having her. She’d chosen to trust me with the specific, difficult, complicated truth of herself — the way her work cost her, the nightmares she wouldn’t tell her clients about, the grief she processed in parking lots rather than let her professional front slip. She’d given me those things one at a time, carefully, because she’d been burned before.
And I’d done this.
Whateverthiswas. I didn’t knowher. I didn’t remember her. I didn’t remember choosing any of it, didn’t remember a single moment that might have explained how I’d gotten from lying next to Bea to an unknown woman sneaking out of my room without her bra. But not remembering it wasn’t the same as it not happening. The evidence was on the nightstand. The womanhadbeen in my room.
I thought about calling Bea.
I could see exactly how it went. She’d stay calm. Ask the right questions. Try to hold us intact — and she’d do it right, shealways did everything right — and I’d spend the next year being the thing she couldn’t fix.
I cheated on Bea. I fucking cheated. That’s a hard line — the kind you don’t come back from, no matter how much you want to. I’d watched it happen enough times to know. A brother strays, swears it meant nothing, and maybe it didn’t. But the trust is gone. His woman can’t unlearn it. It gets thrown back in every argument for years, used as a weapon or just there, always there, this thing sitting in the middle of everything. You see it in the way she stops reaching for him in public. The way he over-explains when he’s five minutes late. The relationship keeps going but it’s a different relationship, smaller than the one they had before.
