7. Isaac
— ? —
Isaac
I’ve imagined this moment a hundred times.
Chantal, finally free. Chantal, finally seeing Cedrick for who he really is. Chantal, in the passenger seat of my truck, letting me take her away from everything that’s been hurting her.
In my fantasies, she turns to me with grateful eyes and tells me she’s always known. That she felt it too - this thing between us I’ve been swallowing for five years.
None of my fantasies looked like this.
She’s still in her dinner dress, emerald silk bunched around the swell of her belly, face lit by passing streetlights - pale one second, gold the next.
She hasn’t cried. Hasn’t screamed. She just sits there with her face turned to the window, one hand on her stomach, so still she could be carved from marble.
Her hands stopped shaking somewhere around mile four.
Mine haven’t stopped.
“You can say something,” she says finally, to the window. “You’ve been rehearsing something for ten miles. I can hear you doing it.”
“I haven’t-”
“Isaac.”
“…Okay, I had three openers and they were all terrible.”
“Give me the worst one.”
“‘So. Nice weather for a divorce.’”
She makes a sound - not a laugh, but the ancestor of one. “That’s genuinely awful.”
“Told you. The other two were worse.”
I drive without direction. Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty. I’m hyperaware of her presence in the passenger seat - the sound of her breathing, the rustle of silk when she shifts, the faint scent of her perfume mixed with something darker that’s just her.
I’ve been breathing her in for five years. I’d know it anywhere.
Stop it. She detonated her marriage an hour ago. She doesn’t need you being a creep about her perfume.
Eventually the lights thin out and a diner glows against the dark like a lighthouse.
“You need to eat,” I say. “The baby needs you to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Didn’t ask.”
She looks over at me then, the first time since the driveway. “You’re bossy tonight.”
“I’m terrified tonight. It comes out bossy.”
Inside, the place is mostly empty - a few truckers at the counter, fluorescent lights buzzing. A waitress with tired eyes and a name tag reading DOTTIE takes one look at Chantal’s dress and my face and doesn’t ask a single question, which earns her my loyalty for life.
“Waffles,” I say. “Two orders.”
“Rough night, hon?” Dottie asks Chantal anyway, gently.
“I ruined a crème br?lée,” Chantal says.
“Well.” Dottie writes nothing down. “Waffles’ll fix that.”
Chantal takes three bites, mechanical and joyless. She sets down the fork. She lines it up parallel with the knife, very precisely, like the placement matters.
Then the tears come.
They start slow - a glisten, a tremor in her lower lip - and then she’s sobbing. Ugly, gasping sobs that shake her whole body, that make the truckers look over with uncomfortable sympathy.
I don’t think. I just move.
I slide into her side of the booth and pull her against my chest, wrapping my arms around her the way I’ve imagined doing a thousand times, and she buries her face in my shirt and cries like she’s breaking apart, her fingers clutching my collar like I’m the only thing holding her together.
I hold her.
For twenty minutes, I hold her, and I hate myself.
I hate myself because this is the worst night of her life and I’m cataloging the way she fits against me. The weight of her in my arms, heavy and real and finally here. She’s sobbing into my shirt and some animal part of my brain is memorizing it.
You’re a monster. She needs a friend, not a man who was in love with her before she ever walked down that aisle.
When the sobs finally slow to shuddering breaths, I hand her a stack of napkins. My hand is steady. Miracle.
“A month,” she says into my chest, voice wrecked. “I held it together for a month. Breakfasts. The gala. I slept next to him, Isaac. I let him-” She stops. Swallows. “A month, and I lose it over waffles.”
“It wasn’t the waffles.”
“It was a little bit the waffles.” She pulls back enough to wipe her eyes, smearing mascara across her cheek.
“He never once took me for waffles. Four years. We went to restaurants with foam, Isaac. Foam on things. And I’m sitting here in a fifty-year-old booth and it’s the first meal in a month that anyone’s ordered because I needed it, and I just-”
She stops, because her voice has gone to pieces again, and I very carefully do not say any of the ten things pressing against my teeth.
“For what it’s worth,” I say instead, “that was the most savage thing I’ve ever witnessed.”
A wet, broken laugh. “You said that in the truck.”
“It bears repeating.”
“I ruined the crème br?lée.”
“The caterer will recover.” I nudge the plate toward her.
“He won’t, though. You know that, right?
His family saw everything. His mother looked like she wanted to murder him with her bare hands.
By tomorrow, half the town will have a version of that dinner party, and none of the versions end well for him. ”
“Good.”
“Every person at that table is going to tell everyone they know.”
“Good.”
“He’s going to spend the rest of his life explaining why his wife played a recording of his mistress over dessert.”
She meets my eyes, and something fierce flickers there. Something that looks almost like satisfaction.
“Good.”
She’s still pressed against my side. Her thigh is warm against mine. Her hand is resting on my knee - I don’t think she knows she put it there, but I am excruciatingly aware of every square inch of contact.
Move away. She’s vulnerable and you’re taking advantage.
I don’t move.
Neither does she.
“You knew for a whole year,” she says quietly. “And you still went to his poker nights.”
There it is. The knife I’ve been waiting for all night.
“Yeah.”
“You sat across the table from him and dealt him cards.”
“Yeah.” I make myself hold her gaze. “And I told myself it was strategy - keep close, keep watch, make sure he kept his word. But mostly I was a coward, Chantal. I didn’t want to be the guy who broke you. So I let him keep doing it slow instead. I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. The fluorescents buzz. Dottie refills coffee nobody ordered.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks. “Tonight. This. Driving me around. Holding me while I cry. Sitting in a diner at midnight when you could be literally anywhere else.”
Because I’ve been in love with you since before you were ever his.
Because watching you walk down that aisle was the worst day of my life.
Because I would do anything - anything - if it meant you’d keep looking at me the way you’re looking at me right now.
I can’t say any of it. She blew up her marriage two hours ago. The last thing she needs is my five years landing on her like an ambush.
“Because you’re my friend,” I say instead. “Because you deserve better than what he gave you. Because I hate seeing you hurt.”
All true. Just not the whole truth.
She holds my gaze a beat too long - and for one second, one dangerous second, her eyes drop to my mouth and my whole nervous system whites out.
Then she reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Her fingers are cold from the ice water. Delicate. Certain.
The touch goes through me like lightning.
“Thank you,” she says softly.
I don’t trust my voice, so I just nod.
We sit there, hand in hand, until the diner closes around us.
Back at the truck, my phone lights up.
CEDRICK: Is she with you? I swear to God, Isaac, if you touch her-
I stare at the message, and something cold settles in my stomach.
He’s known all along. He’s seen the way I look at her. He’s watched me at every party, every dinner, every gathering where Chantal was in the room, and he’s known.
He just never thought I’d be a threat.
I never was a threat. I was too much of a coward to even try.
I think about all the times I watched him ignore her. All the times I bit my tongue when he canceled plans, when he “worked late,” when he looked at other women with eyes that should have been reserved for his wife.
I think about standing at their wedding, watching her walk down the aisle in white, knowing I was losing something I never had.
Fuck him.
I type two words: She’s safe.
Then I turn off my phone and start the engine.
“What was that?” Chantal asks.
“Cedrick. Asking if you’re with me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re safe.” I pull out of the parking lot. “That’s all he deserves to know.”
She stares at me for a long moment. The dashboard glow catches the salt tracks on her cheeks, and she is, ruined mascara and all, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I hate myself a little for thinking it and I think it anyway.
Then she reaches across the center console and takes my hand again.
Her fingers lace through mine. Deliberate, this time. Unmistakable.
“Isaac?”
“Yeah?”
“Waffles were the right call.”
I keep my eyes on the road and try to remember how to breathe.