Chapter 16
Monday. The day after.
I wake to silence. Liam is beside me — he came home last night after I called, found the apartment clean and the windows still open and me sitting on the couch in the dark.
He didn't ask how it went. He just closed the windows and brought me a glass of water and sat next to me until I was ready to talk.
I wasn't ready. I said "it's done" and he said "okay" and we went to bed.
Now it's morning. He's already gone — early meeting, a note on the counter next to a fresh pot of coffee. Thinking of you. Call if you need me.
I drink the coffee standing at the window. My hands don't shake. My body feels strange — light and heavy at the same time. Like the morning after a fever breaks. The worst is over but you're still not yourself yet.
No text from Kate. No text from Vanessa. Whatever she is now — whatever name belongs to the woman who walked out of my apartment carrying bagels — she hasn't reached out. Radio silence.
I check the group chat. Rachel: Anything from her?
Me: Nothing.
Rachel: Same here. Silence. We wait.
* * *
I go to my studio. I have work — real work.
The Hartwell wedding is in nine days. The cake is designed, the mock-up is approved, but I haven't started the actual tiers.
Four tiers, semi-naked with fig accents and gold leaf, feeds 120.
I need to bake the layers today, wrap and freeze them, start the buttercream tomorrow.
Work. The thing I can do. The thing that hasn't lied to me.
I measure ingredients. Four batches of vanilla bean sponge — twenty-four eggs, two kilos of flour, a kilo and a half of butter.
Industrial scale. My arms ache by the time I've creamed the fourth batch but it's good — the ache is earned, physical, real.
I pour into tins and rotate through the ovens and the studio smells like home and I breathe.
Between batches I sit on the floor with my back against the walk-in cooler door and I think about the wedding album.
It sits on the top shelf of our bedroom closet.
Leather-bound, cream pages, gold embossing: Danielle & Liam, June 14.
I haven't opened it since September — brought it out to show my cousin visiting from out of town, flipped through the pages, pointed to Kate in the getting-ready shots and said "that's my best friend, she organized everything. "
My cousin said Kate seemed lovely. I agreed.
The album is poisoned now. Not destroyed — the photos still exist, the day still happened, the vows were real — but every image has a secondary reading.
Kate holding my train. Kate dabbing her eyes during the ceremony.
Kate in the background of the first dance, wine glass raised, smiling at us.
Kate, Kate, Kate. Eighteen photos out of forty-seven feature her visibly in frame.
I know because I counted them last Tuesday at 2 AM while Liam slept.
Eighteen out of forty-seven. Nearly forty percent of my wedding album contains the face of a woman who wore my dress before I did.
I can't throw the album away. Those are the only photos of my grandmother at the wedding — she died in August. My dad crying as he walked me down the path.
My mother and Liam's mother embracing for the first time.
My college roommate who flew from Singapore.
The album isn't only Kate. It's everyone.
But she's there. In the margins. In the backgrounds. In the frame.
* * *
Tuesday. Still nothing from Vanessa.
I text the group: Day 2. No contact.
Lauren: She's thinking. Or packing.
Nina: Can someone drive by her apartment? See if she's still there?
Me: I can go Thursday. I have her keys.
Rachel: Don't use the keys. Just drive by. See if lights are on. Car in the lot.
I agree. Thursday. Drive by. Check.
I spend Tuesday on buttercream — fifteen batches of Swiss meringue.
Egg whites and sugar over a double boiler until it hits 160 degrees, then into the mixer until stiff peaks, then butter added one tablespoon at a time while the mixture threatens to curdle and then comes back together silky and smooth. Vanilla bean paste. A pinch of salt.
I do this fifteen times. My kitchen scale knows my hand. The thermometer reads 160 and I don't even look anymore — I feel it. The way the whisk moves through the meringue changes at exactly the right temperature. Thicker. Slower. Ready.
Muscle memory. The body knows things the mind hasn't processed yet. My body knows how to make buttercream the way Kate's body knows how to make friends. Automatic. Practiced. Perfect every time.
Except mine is real and hers is performance.
* * *
Wednesday. A text.
Not from Vanessa. From a number I don't recognize.
This is Vanessa. New number. I'm not reaching out to argue. I wanted to tell you directly: I'm leaving Hartford. Friday. I won't be here after that.
I screenshot it immediately. Send to the group chat.
Rachel: She's complying.
Lauren: Or performing compliance while she sets up somewhere else.
Nina: Does it matter? She's leaving. That's what we asked for.
Sadie: It matters if she does it again.
Rachel: The website stays ready. Indefinitely. If she resurfaces under ANY name in ANY city targeting ANY wife, we publish. She knows that.
I stare at the text. I'm leaving Hartford. Friday. Four words that mean: I'm losing her. Not the real her — there was no real her — but the space she occupied. Sunday brunches. Wednesday dinners. The voice in my phone that said love you, Danny with an emoji heart.
Three years of that. Gone by Friday.
I type back: Thank you for telling me.
I don't know why I thank her. Politeness, maybe. Reflex. Three years of being kind to Kate, and even now my fingers default to courtesy.
She doesn't reply.
* * *
Thursday. I drive past 44 Birchwood Lane at 4 PM.
Her car — a white Mazda3 — is in the lot.
The apartment windows on the third floor are lit.
She's home. Packing, probably. Or sitting in her vanilla-scented living room with her succulents and her color-coded bookshelf, deciding what to take and what to leave behind when she becomes someone else again.
I don't stop. I don't use the keys. I just drive past, slow enough to confirm, fast enough that she wouldn't notice if she happened to look out.
At home I return her keys to the junk drawer. I won't be needing them again.
* * *
Thursday night. Liam and I sit at the kitchen island. Dinner — just pasta, nothing elaborate. I don't have the energy for elaborate.
"She's leaving Friday," I say.
"Good," he says. Then, quieter: "Is it good?"
"I don't know." I push a piece of penne around my plate. "It's what we asked for. But it means she was real enough to leave. She existed here. She had a lease and a car and keys to my apartment and a spot at my table. And now she'll just... not."
"You're allowed to grieve that."
"I don't want to grieve HER."
"Not her. What you thought she was. The friendship you thought you had." He's careful. Choosing words like I choose piping tips — the right one for the pressure required. "That was real to you even if it wasn't real to her."
I look at him. This man who took one photo and spent a year suffocating in silence about it. Who said it's over to a woman I thought was my friend. Who sat across from Kate at my dinner table and said nothing because the saying would have been worse than the silence.
"Are we going to be okay?" I ask.
He doesn't answer immediately. That's how I know he's being honest — a liar answers fast.
"I want to be," he says. "I think we can be. But I don't get to decide that alone."
"No," I agree. "You don't."
We eat. The pasta is fine. The kitchen is quiet. Outside, October wind pushes leaves against the window and the streetlight flickers the way it always does — a rhythm I know, a pattern I can read, a thing that is exactly what it appears to be.
Tomorrow she's gone.
I don't pipe tonight. I don't bake. I just sit with the quiet and let it be enough.