36. Shoyu Ramen #2
For a moment, he looked like he wanted to tell me what I might want to hear.
That, yes, of course, he’d noticed me, that he’d been secretly pining for the shy girl in the kitchen all along.
That, just like the guy in the hotel room shouted, he was in love with me the whole time, still was, wanted me forever and ever, amen.
I sincerely doubted he even remembered that part, though.
I was relieved when he set down his chopsticks and met my eyes honestly.
“No,” he said. “I never did.”
Something like relief flowed through me instead of disappointment.
“I didn’t think so,” I said before taking a bite of noodles.
“I know that’s awful to say, but you asked for the truth. Lucas told me about some soup you made me when I was sick, but if I’m being totally honest, I don’t remember it at all. You were just…there. Part of the background, I guess. I have no idea when you were hired. Was it really ten years ago?”
It stung, but not nearly as much as it might have a year ago, or even a month ago.
“What about after I came back?” I pressed. “After we met on the plane, and the party, and that walk to the boathouse—did you actually think you were in love with me after just a few interactions?”
Some part of me—the part that would always be that fifteen-year-old, star-struck maid—sat on the edge of her seat with anticipation.
Daniel swirled the noodles with his chopsticks. Again, I could see him wrestling with whether to give me a comfortable lie or an uncomfortable truth.
“I wasn’t. I mean, you’re very pretty and all.
That’s not a line—you really are, Marie.
But, yeah, I think I liked the chase more than anything else.
The idea of you and what you represented in my head.
When I got on that plane, Hubbard had just told my parents about Emma, and everyone thought I was a complete fuckup.
Except you, this young, innocent thing who was looking at me like I hung the moon.
” He shrugged with an honesty that was almost brutal.
“Plus, if I legitimately fool with the staff again, Mom would probably kill me herself. I lost my virginity to one of the maids when I was, I think, fourteen? She never hired a cute staff member again.”
I couldn’t help but flinch. How unaware he was that I used to be one of those invisible, unremarkable people? I was a girl deliberately chosen to be unnoticeable, unthreatening.
Then I thought about Lucas, who had told me more than once that I’d always been beautiful to him. He had noticed me, really seen me, years before I’d learned to see myself.
An ache of loss throbbed through me like a seismic wave. I missed him. God, I missed him so much it physically hurt.
I hated that it hurt that way.
I stabbed a chopstick into my bowl like it was the ache itself I was trying to kill.
“Besides,” Daniel continued, apparently taking my silence as permission to keep going. “I don’t know if I’m even capable of love. How pathetic is that? I might not even be a good person.”
I looked up. “I don’t think that’s true. A bad person wouldn’t have asked me here. He wouldn’t have wanted to make amends at all.”
“Maybe.” He finally took another sip of his drink, then, with a quick glance at me, pushed it away. “What about you? Do you think you were really in love with me for ten years, like Lucas said?” His sky-blue eyes widened, like an animal caught in a cage.
Lord, even the idea of that kind of love scared him.
I considered the question seriously, twirling noodles around my chopsticks and then taking a bite and swallowing, more to torture him a little than anything else.
I wasn’t heartless, but I was still stinging from that “no cute staff members” comment.
“No,” I said eventually. “I don’t think I was ever legitimately in love with you. With an idea of you, maybe. A fantasy I’d built up in my head. But I never really knew you either, did I? Not the real you.”
Daniel looked visibly relieved. Almost understanding. “I guess we both had a thing for our imaginations, huh?”
“I guess we did.”
I offered a bittersweet smile, thinking again about Lucas. Who had seemed so real from the very beginning, even when he was lying. Whose pain and loneliness and capacity for love had all felt genuine, even when his motivations were complicated.
Lucas, whom I’d walked away from twice now and whom I would probably never see again.
The ache in my chest intensified.
I stabbed my noodles again, and this time left the chopsticks in place. I had completely lost what little appetite I had today.
“How is he?” I couldn’t help asking.
Daniel looked up from his soup curiously. “Lucas? I guess you could say he’s back to his old self, though, who knows? He went straight back to work as soon as we landed. Has been staying at his place in the city. I think he’s still mad at me, the grouch.”
I pictured the Lucas I’d known before everything changed.
Cold, demanding, working constantly, and treating everyone around him like chess pieces.
I knew now that it had been yet another mask for his internal misery, a way of coping with having no actual choices in his life.
He was stuck in a gilded cage of his own making.
The thought of him retreating into that loneliness again made my heart hurt even more.
I pushed my bowl away, content now to wait for Daniel to finish.
When the check came, he insisted on paying, saying it was the least he could do to make up for how he’d treated me. As we prepared to leave, he pulled something out of his jacket pocket—a cream-colored envelope with elegant script.
“You don’t, um, want to come, do you?” he asked, holding out what was clearly a wedding invitation.
I took it and stared at the swirling calligraphy and the gold-embossed letters. “Seriously?”
He shrugged. “I could use more friends on my side of the aisle. In a weird way, you kind of know me better than most of mine, just from this one conversation.”
I looked at the invitation, specifically the part about celebrating the union of Emma Hubbard and Daniel Lyons. It was exactly the event I’d dreamed of for myself, once upon a time. First, as his date, but eventually, as the other name on the invitation next to his.
How odd that seemed now. How wrong.
“I think I’d better not.” I handed the invitation back to him. “One party invitation from you was enough to turn my life upside down, don’t you think?”
Daniel chuckled and tucked the invite back into his jacket. “You’re funny, Marie. Huh. I never knew that about you.”
We stood outside the restaurant for a moment, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows down Amsterdam Avenue. It felt like the end of something—not just this conversation, but the entire chapter of my life that had been defined by my hopeless crush on Daniel Lyons.
“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said and meant it. “Both of you.”
He didn’t look particularly convinced by the idea but accepted my words like a gentleman. “Thanks. What about you, though? What’s next?”
“Back to France. Next week, actually. I’m going to find a small town somewhere and open my own place.”
“That sounds perfect for you. Well, what little of you I know.” Daniel grinned, and for once, it didn’t look rehearsed.
I couldn’t help but grin back.
“Good luck, Marie. I mean that.”
“Good luck to you too.”
We hugged briefly, awkwardly, and then he sauntered away down the street. I watched him go, noting how he walked into the first bar he passed.
Some things, apparently, would never change.
But at least now I understood what those things were.
Joni and Nathan’s apartment felt like a sanctuary when I let myself in with the spare key.
“Everything decent?” I called out when I heard them in the living room, talking quietly.
I wasn’t taking my chances after catching them that one day at Lea’s. There had been a few other close calls while I’d stayed here this week.
“Oh my God, you prude, we’re just hanging out,” Joni called from the living room.
I removed my shoes at the door—Nathan was a fastidious man—and hung my purse on the hall rack, then walked in to find them sitting on the rug in front of Nathan’s gray couch.
Nathan was looking over some plans for their new house while Joni stretched, allowing him to reach over to help when it suited him.
They looked so perfectly domestic, so in sync with each other despite their obvious differences. It was beautiful, but it also made me feel like I was intruding on their carefully constructed life.
This place was a sanctuary, I realized. But not for me.
“So, how was lunch with Prince Charming?” Joni asked as she pushed herself into a lateral split.
“Illuminating.” I dropped onto an armchair across from them. “And final. We both figured out we never really knew each other at all. He apologized and went into a bar. I left for my new life. The end.”
“Technically, you left to come here,” Nathan observed, looking up from his plans.
Joni rolled her eyes as she sat up. “She was exaggerating, you goober.”
Nathan looked up, startled, then seemed to warm when he caught my sister’s grin. “Ah. Understood.”
I looked away while Joni rewarded Nathan’s social awkwardness with a thorough kiss. That the more clueless Nathan was about social moments like these, the more my sister seemed to love him for it.
Once again, Lucas came to mind, damn him. His quiet, almost shy watchfulness. And the way he had also seemed to enjoy my own awkward moments. My innocence, as it were.
There was that ache again, right in the center of my chest.
“There’s leftover stir-fry on the stove if you want some,” Joni said. “I made it myself, so you know it’s questionable, but Nathan choked it down.”
“I have a very strong stomach,” Nathan commented dryly. “One that’s become acclimated to Joni’s attempts in the kitchen.”
She kissed him again. “It’s how I know you love me, babe.”
Nathan didn’t argue with her assessment.
“I ate with Daniel,” I said, standing up. “And I told you I’d cook for you guys while I’m here.”
Nevertheless, my stomach was growling after eating so little at lunch, so I went to the kitchen to check out Joni’s latest culinary failure.
I lifted the lid off the pot and immediately clamped it back down.
The smell was overwhelming. Surprisingly not bad, necessarily, but both garlicky and fishy in a way that made my stomach lurch.
I barely made it to the bathroom before I was violently sick.
“Mimi?” Joni’s voice came through the door with a soft knock. “Are you okay?”
I sat on the bathroom floor, my head spinning. God, everything ached. My heart, yes, but the rest of me too. My breasts, my lower back, my stomach. Maybe I was getting sick because usually PMS wasn’t quite this bad for me…
Sweat broke out on my forehead as the realization dawned.
When was my last period? I’d been so caught up in the emotional chaos of the last month or so—Lucas, the heartbreak, fleeing to Paris, moving back to New York—that I hadn’t been paying attention to my body’s rhythms.
My cycle had finished a few days into our stay in Brazil.
And I hadn’t had it again in the last four…no, five weeks.
Maybe even six now.
Oh, God .
“I’m fine,” I called, though my voice sounded anything but confident. “But, um, Joni? I need you to run to the drugstore for me. I’m going to need a pregnancy test.”