Chapter Three
The Excuse
Priya was already at the table when I got to the coffee shop, two cups steaming in front of her, mine ordered exactly the way I like it, oat milk, one pump of vanilla, extra hot. She's known that order for fifteen years. She probably knows it better than Damon does.
"You look tired," she said as I sat down. "Everything okay?"
"Just a long week."
"The gala was gorgeous, by the way. You did such a good job planning it.
" She wrapped both hands around her cup and smiled at me, and for a second, just a second, I almost forgot what I'd heard in that hallway.
She looked so much like the girl who used to sleep over at my house, who cried with me over my first breakup, who stood beside me on my wedding day in a lavender dress she still says is her favorite thing she's ever worn.
"Thanks," I said. "It was a lot of work."
"You always make it look easy."
I watched her stir her coffee even though there was nothing in it to stir. A nervous habit. She's had it since we were kids.
"Priya, can I ask you something?"
"Course."
"You and Damon. Are you two close these days?"
Her spoon stopped moving.
"We talk sometimes," she said, and there was a beat, just a small one, before the rest came out. "Since Marcus died, he's been really good about checking on me. Making sure I'm okay."
"That's kind of him."
"It is." She looked up at me then, and her eyes were doing something I couldn't quite read, something careful. "I don't have a lot of people, El. Not since Marcus. You know that."
I did know that. Priya's husband died two years ago, in a car accident on the interstate, sudden and senseless and cruel in the way those things always are.
She'd been a wreck for months. We all had.
I remember sitting with her on her bathroom floor at two in the morning while she cried so hard she couldn't breathe.
"I'm glad someone's checking on you," I said, and I meant it, or I wanted to mean it, or some tangled version of both.
"Damon's been a good friend."
Friend. That word sat strange in my chest, like a stone I'd swallowed without meaning to.
"I heard you two talking at the gala," I said. I hadn't planned to say it that plainly, but it came out before I could stop it. "In the hallway by the study."
Her face changed. Just slightly. A tightening around the eyes.
"Oh," she said. "That was nothing. I was just having a rough night. Marcus's birthday would have been that week, and it hit me kind of hard, and Damon found me and let me talk it out. That's all."
It sounded reasonable. It sounded like something a good friend would do. But my instinct, the same one that had kept my feet frozen in that hallway, was telling me something different, and I'd learned a long time ago not to argue with it.
"He said sorry to you," I said. "More than once."
"Sorry that I'm going through a hard time. Sorry he can't fix it. People say sorry for all kinds of things, El." She reached across the table and put her hand over mine. "You're not thinking there's something going on, are you?"
"I don't know what I'm thinking."
"Elena." She squeezed my hand. "It's me. You know me. I would never."
I wanted to believe her. God, I wanted to. But something about the way she said it, so fast, so smooth, like she'd rehearsed the line before I even asked the question, made the stone in my chest sit even heavier.
We finished our coffee talking about other things, her sister's new baby, a show we both used to watch, safe things, easy things. But underneath all of it, I felt the conversation we hadn't finished sitting between us like a third person at the table.
Damon was home when I got back, sitting at the kitchen island with his laptop open, a glass of scotch beside him even though it was only four in the afternoon.
"How was coffee?" he asked without looking up.
"Fine. I asked her about the hallway."
That got his attention. He closed the laptop slowly, like he was buying himself time.
"What about it?"
"I heard you two talking. I heard you apologize to her. More than once."
He rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture I'd seen a thousand times, usually right before he had to deliver bad news in a business meeting.
"It's not what you think, Elena."
"Then tell me what it is."
"Priya's struggling. Ever since Marcus died, she's had nobody. Her family overseas, her friends kind of scattered after the funeral the way people do, and I just felt like somebody in this family needed to step up and make sure she wasn't completely alone."
"So you check on her."
"Yes."
"Alone. In hallways at parties. Where you specifically said someone could see us."
His jaw tightened. "You were listening that whole time?"
"I heard enough."
"Elena, it's not an affair, if that's what you're thinking.
It's not like that at all. I feel a sense of duty toward her.
Marcus was my friend too, you know that.
I promised him once, kind of jokingly, that if anything ever happened to him I'd look out for her.
I didn't think I'd actually have to keep that promise. "
"A sense of duty," I repeated.
"Yes."
"That requires you to tell her you're sorry, more than once, in a hallway, hoping I wouldn't walk by."
"I said that because I didn't want it to look bad. Not because it was bad. There's a difference, Elena."
I stood there in our kitchen, the same kitchen where I'd stood two mornings earlier deciding to look things dead in the face, and I realized this was exactly the kind of moment I'd promised myself I wouldn't back down from.
"Why sorry, Damon? What exactly are you sorry for?"
He hesitated. That hesitation told me more than anything he said after it.
"I'm sorry I can't be there for her more. I'm busy. The company takes up so much of my time, and she needs someone, and I feel guilty that I can't give her more of my time when she's hurting so much."
"You feel guilty."
"Yes."
"About a widow needing more of your time."
"Elena, you're twisting this into something it's not."
"Am I?" My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "Because from where I stood, it sounded like two people who didn't want to be interrupted. It sounded like something that had happened before, more than once, something you were both careful about hiding."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it though?" I heard myself borrow Camille's exact words from that phone call months ago, and something about saying them out loud, in my own kitchen, to my own husband, made the whole thing feel more real than it had felt in that hallway.
Damon stood up from the island and came around to where I was standing, reaching for my hands. I let him take them, but I didn't soften into it the way I usually did.
"Elena, look at me. I love you. I married you. There is nothing happening with Priya except me trying to be a decent human being to a woman who lost her husband. That's it. That's the whole truth."
"Then why did it feel like a secret?"
"Because I knew how it would look. I knew you'd react exactly like this, and I didn't want you to worry over nothing."
"So you decided for me what I should and shouldn't worry about."
He didn't have an answer for that one. He just stood there holding my hands, and for the first time in six years, I noticed that his grip felt less like comfort and more like something trying to hold me still.
"I need you to trust me," he said finally.
"I want to."
"But?"
"But wanting to and actually trusting you again are two different things, Damon. And right now, I don't know which one I've got."
He let go of my hands slowly, like he was hoping I'd change my mind and reach back for him. I didn't.
That night I lay in bed beside him, staring at the ceiling the same way I had two nights before, except this time the crack in my chest felt a little wider, a little more permanent.
Duty, he'd called it. A sense of duty. But duty doesn't lower its voice in the hallway.
Duty doesn't check to see if the wife might be walking by.
Duty doesn't say sorry, more than once, in a tone soft enough to sound like something else entirely.
I thought about Priya's hand over mine at the coffee shop, her voice so smooth and certain. I would never, she'd said. But she hadn't looked surprised when I mentioned the hallway. She'd looked ready. Like she'd known this conversation was coming and had already decided exactly what to say.
Two people, I thought, lying there in the dark. Two people giving me the same careful, rehearsed version of the truth. And both of them expected me to just accept it and go back to being the woman who smiled at galas and planned charity dinners and never asked the harder questions.
I wasn't going to be her anymore. Not after this.
Somewhere around midnight, Damon shifted in his sleep and reached for me the way he sometimes does, pulling me closer without waking.
I let him hold me, mostly because I didn't have the energy to pull away, but I lay there wide awake in his arms, running through everything he'd said, every word, every hesitation, every place where the story didn't quite line up.
A sense of duty, he'd said.
But I'd heard his voice in that hallway. I knew what duty sounded like, and it didn't sound anything like that.