The rage that went through me was like something I had never felt before. “I’m sorry, Alyssa,” was all I could manage.
Tears welled in her eyes. “The scar on Micah’s forehead?Everytime I see it, it’s a reminder of my poor choices.Ichose Malik.”
“That’s not on you.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You weren’t in that house. Every part of it is his. You don’t get to take it on just because he’s not here to hold it anymore.”
She wiped under her eyes. “Sitting on the other side of it, I can’t believe how oblivious I was. How foolish. The affairs. The debt. Years of it, hidden from me. Things I’d signed without reading, because I trusted that he handled the paperwork. Me a lawyer, being so dumb as to accept his CliffsNotes and not actually read what he handed me to sign. By the time it all came out, it was over a million dollars of debt.”
“He left you a million in the hole?”
She nodded. “Fought it down to under half. Then I stopped fighting and filed. I wanted to be free more than I wanted to be right. So I let it all go. The house with it.”
“You lost your home too?”
She shrugged. “That one I didn’t grieve. The equity was gone anyway, and every room had his smell in it. Where he cheated. Where Micah got hurt. I didn't get to sell it on my own terms, but I was relieved when it went, even though it was taken.”
She went somewhere else for a second.
“The thing thatreallygot me? I had this bracelet,” she said. “An Alhambra Van Cleef. I’d bought it myself after I passed the bar. Day after he saidcooland picked his controller back up. I sat in that apartment and I thought, fine.Fine.If he’s not going to mark it, I will. I’dsaved months for it. Wore it the first day I ever argued a case, and every time I argued anything after. I sold it in the aftermath. The house I let go of and didn’t look back. Because the house was ours and there was no us. That bracelet was all mine.”
I didn’t say anything. My quiet was where she kept going, so I let her. She looked down at her hands, then, almost to herself: “Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d just waited. If I’d believed back then that I deserved better. Where I’d be.”
“You’d have found someone who worshipped you.” It was out of me before I’d even thought about it.
She went still and looked at me with a surprised expression. For a moment neither of us said anything, just sat there looking at each other with what I’d said floating in the air between us, too true to take back and too dangerous to pick up.
She dropped her eyes to her drink, settling into a small smile. “Well, he’d have had to get past my mother’s opinions first,” she said, reaching for an exit ramp.
“He would’ve been able to handle that too,” I doubled down, grinning at her.
She shook her head, and laughed, and the air in the room came back down.
But I felt it, still there. The thing I’d said and the way she’d gone still before she let it go. I wasn’t foolish enough to think it had been nothing. Just careful enough not to reach further for it.
11/
survivors don’t need to be saved
alyssa
The bellover Maple’s door announced me, and Julian looked up from the back booth before it finished ringing.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but somewhere between our runs together, Micah’s practices, and the occasional Sunday dinner at Simone and Raschad’s, Tuesday lunches started happening. Standing reservation at noon if Julian was in town. I had assumed, in the beginning, that there would be a lot of last-minute cancellations. The man ran a business, and his life was meetings. But in eight weeks of Tuesdays he had not missed one.
“You’re early.” I smiled.
“You’re late.”
“I’m five minutes late, Julian.” I slid into the booth, picked up my water, and took a sip.
He watched me a second longer than the moment called for. “You did something new to your hair.”
I paused with the glass at my mouth. He did this every time I changed my hair, I realized. Noticed. And every time it flipped something in my stomach.
“Growing it out a little more. Put some new color in.”
