“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.
“Because you weren’t ready,” Sierra replied. “You needed to sit with it. You needed to figure out what you wanted without him asking it of you.”
Calliope quietly cried. Raven had stopped drinking long enough to put her arm around Calliope, which was her version of tenderness. Gruff, physical, unambiguous.
We sat there on the couch, the four of us reduced to three, the movie forgotten on the screen. The romantic couple was kissing now, the perfect ending, the thing that happens when you’re in a story instead of a life.
The credits rolled. Nobody moved to change it.
Calliope wiped her face with the back of her hand. Not quickly. Not the way you wipe tears when you’re trying to make them disappear before anyone notices. The slow kind. The kind that means you’re done pretending you’re not crying.
“I broke up with Margot last week,” she said. “Six weeks in. I knew at three.” No dramatic preface. Just the fact, flat and tired.
“Calli.” Sierra started.
“I know.” Calliope pulled her knees up to her chest, smaller than she ever looked. “Three this year. I know.” She stared at the credits scrolling past on the screen. “I keep thinking I’m being brave, you know? Starting things. Putting myself out there. And then it just…” She stopped. Started again. “I don’t know if I’m doing it wrong, or if I just keep picking wrong, or if this is what it’s supposed to feel like and I’m the only one who can’t figure out how to make it stick.”
Raven’s arm tightened around her shoulders. Sierra reached over and found her hand.
Nobody said it was going to be okay. Nobody needed to. We sat with her the way she’d been sitting with me, just present and just close, and let her be something other than the one who kept everyone laughing.
After a minute, she straightened up, took a breath, and reached for her wine glass. “Okay.” Back to herself, almost. “Your turn again. Tell me what Sierra said about Ellis one more time.”
I laughed, even though nothing was funny. “You heard it the first time.”
“I want to hear it again.” She bumped my shoulder with hers. “He’d rather be uncertain with you than certain without you. Say it.”
“I’d rather be uncertain with you than certain without you.”
Calliope closed her eyes. “God. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? That’s the whole thing.”
I didn’t call Ellis that night. I sat in the dark of Calliope’s living room and let Sierra hold my hand. The most important thing I could do was not undo something. Sometimes brave was staying still. Sometimes love was learning to wait.
Chapter thirty-one
The Harrington & Associates cocktail party was three weeks away, and Ellis showed up on a Thursday night when he absolutely shouldn’t.
I didn’t see him immediately. I was near the bar, talking to Margaret Harrington about the new arrangement installation. The floral emergency got handled, and what emerged from the crisis was actually better than the original plan. Smaller focal points, more strategic, more intentional. What happens when you’re forced to rethink everything from the ground up.
Margaret was mid-sentence about the guest count when something shifted in the room. Nothing I could name yet. The change you registered before you knew you had.
I turned.
Ellis was standing near the window in his work clothes. Dark button-down, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, that careful casual look that meant he’d been sitting in an office all day thinking about coming here. He was not looking at me. He scanned the room, cataloging a moment he had no right to witness.
He was thinner. The break had hollowed him, costing him weight. He’d been the unhappy that forgets to eat, and the weight loss proved it.
I kept talking to Margaret, but I’d abandoned my own body. A ghost-me smiled and nodded while my actual self watched my not-boyfriend stand in a room he didn’t belong in.
He hadn’t seen me watching. He pretended to examine the uplighting, the installations, the bar setup, but he was cataloging me. This was what I didn’t expect when he asked for space: his return. Not to talk. Not to resolve. Just to look. To verify my survival. To confirm that what we built still stood.
Sierra would call this a gesture. Raven would name it soft. Calliope would film it and add sad music. I watched him pretend to admire the room’s architecture and finally understood what I’d been running from. Sometimes bravery didn’t arrive with flowers and speeches. Sometimes it showed up silently, surveyed the damage, and left without renegotiating surrender.
Six minutes. He hadn’t spoken to anyone. Margaret talked about her husband, some charity event, while I tracked Ellis’ movement the way you read weather maps. Predicting his next position. Whether he’ll leave. Whether…
He looked at me. Full attention, eyes locked across forty feet of party, across Harringtons and partners and new clients. For one moment we were the only two people in this room, this world, whatever dimension heartbreak occupies.
No smile. No wave. He held my gaze like he was transferring data about his heart. Message, confirmation, all the things he couldn’t say aloud because speaking would dissolve the boundary we needed.
