Page 9 of Based on You

"I heard a noise." She offered a tight smile. "Welcome home, Mr. Beckett."

"Thank you, Marta. How was she today?"

"It was fine." She lowered her bag onto the bottom step and gave her daily report. "Olivia attended all four of her virtual classes this morning. She logged in on time, and the tutor confirmed she finished the full session. The therapist arrived at three, and they ran a little longer than usual, almost a whole hour. I took that as a good sign."

She folded her hands over her bag strap. "She ate at lunch, too. Soup and half a piece of bread. She even came down to the kitchen herself in the afternoon for a glass of water, which is a lot more movement than we've seen the last few days."

"That's good." I let out a breath I hadn't meant to be holding. "Thank you, Marta."

"Goodnight, sir."

The heavy front door clicked shut behind her. A moment later, the microwave shrilled its alarm. I carried the steaming lasagna to the table, sank into my usual chair, and started eating.

This had always been the shape of my evenings. Dinner eaten alone at the table or the kitchen counter, or sometimes nothing at all, just whatever takeout Violet had managed to order for me during a late night at the office. Elena never ate dinner with me. She always went home to her family. Evenings were for the people you went home to. I had no one to go home to, and for years that quiet had suited me fine.

But the silence in the house now carried a different weight than it used to. Before, it had been an easy quiet, the house keeping my hours without comment, my own footsteps the loudest thing in it. I'd been content. I'd said as much to Elena, to my father, and to myself, and I'd believed every word.

Now the silence pressed inward and sat heavy on my chest. I hadn't dared put the word loneliness on myself in years, because I'd spent that time convincing myself I was a man who didn't need much. That illusion had caved in last year.

My sister never ate dinner with me, but she called every single night I worked late. She showed up unannounced on Fridays balancing two coffees and a fresh complaint, and we bickered the way we had since childhood.

I didn't understand what that tether cost me until someone cut it. The loneliness lived right here at this dining table. It lived in the empty afternoon without a phone call, and it echoed in the forty-seven saved voicemails I couldn't bring myself to delete.

The only stretch that had felt different was the few months with Lara.

I met her on a tedious work trip, at a corporate dinner I hadn't wanted to attend. She was witty, razor-sharp, and beautiful. I found myself more taken with another person than I'd been in years. Those first few months were golden. She was exciting and fiercely curious, nudging me to reconsider wants I hadn't examined in a long time.

Then the gloss cracked when I caught the condescending tone she used with people who worked for her.

The red flags started with Violet. I came back from a long meeting to find Lara at the office, talking to Violet at the assistant's desk in a sharp, clipped register I'd never heard anyone dare use with her. Lara's chin was tipped up, her words flat and aggressively even. She'd already priced the worth of the person in front of her, I realized, and had no interest in revisiting the number.

I confronted her that evening. She deflected, claiming she was just frustrated about my brutal hours and how much time I spent alone with my assistant. I told her plainly that Violet and I shared a floor, and that was the whole of it. She nodded and said she understood. For a few days, the attitude stopped.

Then the comments started. Small, calculated jabs about Violet's dress size, her clothes, her natural hair. Each insult came light, dressed up as an innocent observation. And it didn't stop with Violet. The cruelty spread to restaurant waiters, to valets, to anyone Lara had decided fell below her invisible line of worth.

Elena told me flat out to end it. Lara wasn't a good person, she said, and I already knew it and was just pretending otherwise so I wouldn't be alone.

As always, she was right.

The relief after the breakup was cleaner than I'd expected. The solitary evenings once Lara left were the same solitary evenings as before, but they belonged to me again.

The loneliness, though, stayed dug in. It had never needed Lara to exist.

I was still sitting with that thought, my fork scraping at the ceramic plate, when a new set of footsteps came down the stairs.

I glanced up, expecting Marta to have forgotten something. It wasn't Marta.

Olivia shuffled into the kitchen in oversized pink pajamas, her dark hair hanging loose and tangled around her shoulders. The angle of her jaw, the slope of her shoulders, all of it her mother's. When she was small, I used to tease Elena about birthing her own identical twin. Elena would swat at me and tell me to stop because it was creepy, but I kept it up for years just because it always landed a laugh.

Her hollow eyes met mine for a second before she turned toward the fridge.

"How are you doing tonight, Olivia?"

She gave a wooden nod and yanked the refrigerator door open. "I'm fine."

"How were your virtual classes today?" I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

"Fine." She reached past a row of condiments for the carton of orange juice at the back.