Page 62 of Pretend You Love Me

He nods. Picks up his glass. “Good.” And then he’s back to being Luca, loud and warm and everywhere, and the conversation is simply over.

The water cup happens on a Thursday. Milo is in the highchair, which he’s recently decided is a launching pad rather than a seat, and he reaches for his cup with the confidence of a man who knows where things are. He does not know where the cup is. His hand knocks it off the tray and it lands directly on his own head. The cup bounces away. Milo sits completely still for one stunned second, soaking, and produces an expression of such profound personal betrayal that it seems almost theatrical.

Elsie makes a sound. Then another. Then she claps both hands over her face and makes the sound she makes just before a real laugh, the sharp inhale, and then she is laughing, full and helpless, going scarlet, shoulders shaking, and she pulls her hands down just long enough to say “that did not happen” before dissolving again.

I sit across the table.

And the thought arrives, clear and unannounced and fully assembled, the way thoughts arrive when they’ve been building long enough and have finally run out of patience: God, I love her.

I sit with it for a moment. It doesn’t go away. It just sits there in the middle of my chest, occupying the space that months ago was occupied by a manuscript and good headphones and a productive relationship with silence.

“I’ll get more water,” I say, and stand up.

I spend ninety seconds in the kitchen standing at the counter, not getting water, just standing there while the cold tap runs. Ninety seconds of something I don’t have an easy word for, not panic, not the usual pull toward a door, more like the recalibration that happens when a fact has changed and the rest of the system has to rearrange itself around it.

I fill the glass. I carry it back. Elsie is still laughing, quieter now, wiping her eyes while Milo looks at her with the expression of someone who feels he has been made a spectacle.

I sit back down.

The thought remains just where I left it.

There’s a quality to Page & Grounds after closing that I’ve come to recognise as its own distinct thing. During the day the place is alive in a slightly overwhelming way, voices, the espresso machine, Luca’s running commentary, Milo’s opinions about everything, Maisie’s silent forensic assessment of the room. But at closing, when the last customer has gone and the sign is turned and the door is locked, it settles into something quieter and more honest. The chairs half-stacked. The machine cooling with its usual series of small mechanical sighs. The smell of coffee losing its urgency and becoming something warmer instead.

Tonight there’s rain against the front windows, an even sound that blurs the street outside into amber smears. I’ve been wiping down the counter for longer than is technically necessary. Elsie is cross-legged on the far end of it with a mug of tea in both hands, legs folded under her, hair loose from whatever it was in earlier. She’s been quiet for the last few minutes, not the processing quiet I know to give space to, something softer than that. Like she’s building toward saying something.

“I still feel guilty sometimes,” she says, not quite looking at me. “Like I moved on too fast.”

I stop wiping. Not deliberately, my hands just stop.

She’s looking at the mug, turning it slightly against her palms. She doesn’t elaborate, just lets it sit there, and I get the sense she’s been turning this over for longer than tonight.

I look at her properly. “You spent months grieving someone who was still standing beside you,” I say. “That makes a difference. I don’t think anyone would say this happened too fast.”

Something moves across her face, not quite relief, closer to the expression people get when they hear a thing they already knew but hadn’t managed to say to themselves yet. She goes quiet again. A type of quiet that means she’s turning it over.

Then she says, softer: “I think part of me stopped being married the night I found those messages.”

I set the cloth down on the counter.

The rain fills the silence, and I don’t rush to fill it over the top of that. There are things you can say in moments like this that are technically comforting but end up being wrong because they come too quickly. I know that. So, I stand there for a moment and let it sink in.

What I think about, and this is the thing I don’t say, because it isn’t mine to say, is the months that came after that night changed everything. The evidence she gathered. The custody preparation. The lawyer appointments while Milo and Maisie were in car seats in the back. The gatherings she attended and the meals she cooked and the mornings she spent behind this counter while Daniel was still in the house, still at the table, still behaving like the timeline she was running quietly in the background didn’t exist.

Something pulls tight in my chest that isn’t sympathy. Sympathy is close but isn’t quite it. It’s something more like unease at imagining her that alone, going through something that important, with no way of escaping until it was done.

She looks up. Our eyes meet across the counter for a second. Then she takes a sip of her tea.

“Anyway,” she says, which means she’s done with that part.

“Anyway,” I agree.

And just like that the conversation changes. She asks if I’ve read the book she left on the table near the register last week, the one with the creased spine and the post-it on chapter four. I haven’t. She says the ending is either devastating or infuriating depending on your relationship with unresolved tension, and she’s been arguing with herself about which it is for two days. I tell her both can be true. She considers this like it’s a genuine philosophical position and says she’ll allow it.

She tells me about something Milo did that morning, attempted to eat a coaster with such sustained commitment that she nearly let him just to see if it would work. I tell her about a sentence in the manuscript I’ve been stuck on for three weeks, how sometimes a translation problem isn’t a language problem but a structural one, the original writer hiding something between two words that can’t be replicated in English. She asks which words. I tell her. She thinks about it for longer than I expect and says: “Sometimes there isn’t an equivalent. Sometimes the closest you can get is the meaning behind it.”

I look at her when she says that. She’s not talking about the manuscript, or maybe she is, and it amounts to the same thing.

We end up at the house because the evening extends itself without anyone deciding to extend it. The twins are already down, the monitor a quiet green presence on the side table. The rain is louder here, closer, against a window that’s slightly older than the ones at the cafe. There are books stacked on every flat surface with the cheerful disregard for spatial logic that follows Elsie everywhere. I sit at one end of the couch. She sits near the middle with the paperback she’s been meaning to finish and the intention, she says, of being a productive person who reads a book.