Page 117 of Suite 7

“And we tell her together.” I say it without hesitating. “That part isn’t negotiable.”

“Together,” he agrees.

I nod. His arms don’t loosen.

The water has gone cool by the time we move. He wraps me in a towel, then himself, and we find our way to his bedroom without discussing it. He gives me the gray henley and I climb into bed.

He gets in beside me and turns off the light.

In the dark, his hand finds mine.

“Two weeks,” I say. Anchoring it.

“Two weeks,” he says back.

22 Kane

Sunday morning.

I wake before she does.

This is not unusual. I haven’t slept past six since my residency, a decade of early sites and contractor calls that permanently rewired me.

What’s unusual is waking and not immediately reaching for my phone. Not immediately running the day’s sequence in my head. But lying still for a moment, aware of the weight of another person in my bed and finding, with some surprise, that I don’t want to move.

She’s on her side, facing away from me. Her hair is spread across the pillow in a way that would take forty minutes and a team of people to recreate and costs her nothing in her sleep.

One arm folded under her cheek. The gray henley has ridden up at the back, baring a strip of her hip, and I track it with more attention than I’d admit to. The duvet is mostly hers. Demonstrably, entirely, without any apparent awareness, hers. I have a six-inch strip along the edge.

I let her have it. She doesn’t know she’s taking it. That seems relevant.

I look at her for a moment, this bewildering woman, and feel the word arrangement go quietly obsolete.

Not an arrangement.

I’ve known this for longer than I’ve been willing to name it.

I get up, carefully. She doesn’t stir.

The kitchen is Sunday-quiet, the city outside still soft-edged with morning. I start the coffee and set the grinder running. Then the paper bag from the bakery four blocks over, the one that has the almond croissants she mentioned once, in passing, and which I apparently filed away.

Marcel would find this hilarious. But Marcel is not here.

I arrange the croissants and bagels on a plate when I hear it: the sound of someone waking up in a bed that isn’t theirs. A small sound. Then a longer silence. Then the soft fall of feet on hardwood.

She appears in the kitchen doorway.

Hair everywhere. The henley covering enough. Eyes still half-closed, one cheek creased from the pillow, blinking at the kitchen like she’s establishing coordinates. She sees the food spread on the counter, then me, and opens her mouth.

Her phone buzzes.

She looks down at it, reflex. Her face changes immediately, not dramatically, but I know her face. The half-asleep softness of a moment ago replaced by the look she gets when she’s reading a situation.

“Sloane,” she says. Not a question.

“What does she want?”

“To bring me coffee.” Vera reads the screen. “She was going to come to my apartment.” She looks up at me. “She thinks I’m home.”