Ian stills, silent.
“I wouldn’t trust her with anyone else.” And it’s the God’s honest truth.
Then from the doorway—bare feet on tile, hair still damp, towel around her shoulders—Sophia pads in. “What are you talking about?”
“Dinner,” Ian says without missing a beat.
She looks between us with that expression—the one that says she's clocked the quality of the silence she just walked into and is filing it away for later. Then her eyes land on the steaks on the counter and something shifts in her face entirely.
“Oh, thank God.” She crosses straight to the counter. “I'm actually going to die.”
Ian is already at the fridge. Door open, hand reaching, pulling out the mayonnaise before she's finished speaking. Sets it on the counter beside her plate without looking. Without being asked. An automatic movement of someone who has done this enough times that the action lives in muscle memory rather than thought.
Sophia twists the cap. Doesn't comment on the fact that it was already there.
Ian is already reaching for a spoon.
She takes it. Loads it. And I watch her drag the spoon across her steak. Then take a bite.
“I still can’t wrap my head around mayo with steak.” Ian reaches for a glass.
“You’re not allowed to have an opinion until you’ve tried it,” she shoots back, water dripping from her hair, down her collarbone.
Ian pours her wine without being asked—the right amount, not too full, the way she takes it—and sets it beside her plate. “That’s because I don’t do disgusting.”
Sophia smiles, takes a sip of her wine, and my chest does something that feels wrong.
The mayo already on the counter. The spoon already in her hand. The wine already poured. The complete absence of any exchange between them to make any of it happen.
I file it away beside everything else I've been filing tonight. Because I have no right to feel the uncomfortable consequence of sending the person I trust most to take care of the person I love most and being surprised that they became something to each other in the process.
Dear Nazareth,
You're in the kitchen with Ian.
I can see the light through the open doors from here. Your shape moving through it. The low sound of your voice carrying across the terrace and dissolving into the dark before it reaches me.
I'm sitting at the edge of this pool with my feet in the water and this diary on my knees, and I feel something I haven't felt in so long.
Still.
You're here.
Twenty feet away.
I can hear your voice. Low and even and completely yours.
Ian says something, and there's a pause, and then you say something back and I can't make out the words and it doesn't matter. It has never mattered less.
I don’t know why I’m out here instead of in there with you, writing to you while you’re twenty feet away.
Maybe because I've been writing to you in your absence for so long that I needed to do it once with you close.
To feel the difference.
The difference is everything.
I missed you.
