Page 179 of Suite 7

Silence. Just long enough that I feel it.

Then: “I love you too, you weirdo.”

When we pull apart we’re both crying again. She looks at me with her red eyes and her ruined mascara and shakes her head slightly, like I’m a problem she’s chosen to keep.

“The BDSM thing.” She points at me. “We’re talking about that eventually. I have questions.”

Despite everything — despite all of it — I laugh. “Okay.”

“Not today.” She glances around the small coffee shop, the cold cups, the used napkins, all the evidence of what today cost. “Today we just—” She stops. Can’t find the word.

“Today was enough,” I say.

She looks at me for a moment. Nods.

Small smile. Tentative. Real.

Then she’s gone, and I stand beside the table and watch the door close behind her, and I don’t move for a long moment, just breathing, just feeling the shape of what just happened settle into something I can carry.

I take out my phone.

Getting there, I type to Kane.

Three dots appear immediately.

Then: That’s everything.

I put the phone in my pocket, leave a tip I probably can’t afford, and walk back out into the city.

32 Vera

Sunday night, one week after coffee with Sloane, Kane makes dinner.

Not elaborate — pasta, something from what was already in the kitchen, the methodical sounds of him moving through his own space, water coming to boil, the rhythm of his knife against the board. I sit on the counter and watch him the way I’ve learned to watch him, tracking the slight set of his shoulders when he’s managing something, the care with which he does even ordinary things, like chopping garlic is a problem that deserves his full attention.

The kitchen is quiet except for the city outside.

“You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.

“Occupational hazard.”

He glances over then. The look he gives me — assessing, present, the one that sees straight through whatever I’ve decided to show him — and I make myself hold it instead of looking away.

“Talk to me,” he says.

“I’m fine.”

“Vera.”

I press my palms flat against the edge of the counter. The cool of the marble. The solid fact of it.

“She hasn’t called me.”

He doesn’t say anything — doesn’t rush to fill the silence with something that would help him more than me.

“What if she doesn’t?” I ask. “What if she gets there with you and she can’t get there with me? What if the coffee last week was the ceiling and not the floor?”

He crosses the kitchen to me. Stops close, not touching, just present.