Nine #2
"I was really hoping discovering my husband was having an affair was going to be the emotional rock bottom."
I glance down at my coffee.
"Turns out there was a basement."
She starts crying. Properly now.
"I'm so sorry."
"I know."
"I never wanted to be…"
"The other woman?"
She nods.
"I believed everything he told me." I study her for a long moment. She's scared. Ashamed. Heartbroken. Almost certainly another casualty of Ethan rewriting reality until it suited him.
I could hate her. It would probably be easier.
Instead… I just feel tired.
"What did he promise you?"
She laughs through her tears.
"That he was leaving you."
"Classic."
"He said he'd tell you after…"
She trails off.
"After what?"
She looks away. "There was always something." Of course there was. I nod slowly. Because there always is. Because my husband was the exact cliche character that I write about. Finally, she stands.
"I just… I thought you deserved the truth."
I look up at her. "Thank you."
She blinks. "What for?"
"For being honest. I mean…" I glance out the window.
"…I'd rather be devastated by the truth than comforted by his version of it."
She nods once. Then moves to walk away.
“Wait.” I call out. She pauses and turns back to me. “What made you reach out to me? If you believed him?”
She seems to think about it. “He just seemed ‘off’ the past two weeks.” She shrugs. “I just had a suspicion that his story wasn’t the whole story. So, I asked a coworker that knows you and… well… she enlightened me to the lie I had been fed.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So, I dismiss her with a barely there head tilt and I watch her leave until the café door closes behind her.
I debate getting up to find Luca for more coffee. Because apparently my life has become one long series of things I never saw coming. And if I have to hear one more uncomfortable truth today…
I'd at least like to be caffeinated for it.
Luca takes the seat opposite me less than a minute after Tessa clears the door, which is exactly the amount of time it takes for a) the adrenaline to leak out of my system, and b) the full horror of what just transpired to catch up.
I’m sitting rigid, both hands clutching the mug so hard my knuckles match the ceramic, and I realize I am holding my breath.
I stare at the foam, which has collapsed in on itself, a perfect spiral ruined.
Luca does not say hello. He slides in like he was always meant to occupy this space, lets his forearms rest on the table, and levels his gaze at me with a focus that makes the tiny hairs on my neck stand up.
His outfit is, as ever, a master class in intention: dark chambray shirt, rolled sleeves, simple silver watch, and a bandana knotted at the wrist that reads as aggressively unbothered but is, I know, an emotional tourniquet.
He does not break the silence. He lets it settle around us. He looks at me, and I look at him, and the whole room seems to hush for the drama of it. Finally, he speaks, voice pitched low enough that it doesn’t register with anyone outside our little forcefield.
“I want to find Ethan and string him up for public burning at the stake,” he says, calm as anything. “And I don’t mean figuratively. I want actual fire, Harper. I want to know why our entire history decided to reserve that for witches and never once for a piece-of-shit man who actually earned it.”
It is so direct, so on-the-nose, that my first reaction is laughter.
I press the backs of my fingers to my mouth, still half-smiling, not sure whether to be grateful or horrified that the only person who sees me this clearly is also the one most likely to organize a literal lynch mob if I ever gave him the go-ahead.
Luca sees the laugh and lets it ride, lips quirking at the edge, but his eyes do not move from mine.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Not to be dramatic, but I heard that entire conversation, and I want to know why men are allowed to light fires in other people’s lives and then walk away with their eyebrows still attached. ”
He reaches across the table, palm up, invitation and demand in equal measure. My hand is shaky but I give it over, and he closes his around mine like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
For a minute we don’t say anything. He lets me sit with it, the warmth of his grip settling me, making the room feel less likely to cave in on itself.
Finally he says, “You know you didn’t deserve that, right?”
I want to say, “Of course,” but the word sticks somewhere between my chest and my throat. I squeeze his hand, a kind of Morse code for “maybe, sometimes, not yet.”
“I mean it,” he says, voice a notch softer.
“The only thing more tragic than him screwing over both you and Tessa is that you blame yourself for not seeing it coming. But you did see it coming, Harper. You just believed in him anyway. That’s not a character flaw.
That’s you being the only one in the marriage who isn’t an actual sociopath. ”
I blink, once, twice. “That’s a low bar.”
“Most of history’s great bars are pretty low, darling. That’s what makes them so easy to drink under.”
A pause. Then, quietly furious: “Don’t you dare start thinking it’s your job to be the one who understands the villain. You’re not the villain in this story, and you’re not his emotional janitor. That’s not your job anymore.”
I feel a weird prickle behind my eyes and try to blink it away, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Instead, I just sit there and let the coffee grow cold, holding onto his hand like it’s the only thing grounding me in this room.
Eventually, Luca tilts his head, a deliberate change in energy, and says, “Okay, now that I’ve hit my quota of emotional confrontation for the week, let’s pivot to something more important.”
He lets go of my hand, leans back, drops one leg over the other, and adopts the tone of a talk-show host about to launch a blind item segment.
“So, Harper,” he says, “on a scale from one to ‘what happens in Vegas,’ how much contact have you had with the absolute hunk of man meat you went home with last week?”
It takes me a beat to process the whiplash. “Man meat?”
Luca spreads both hands, palms up. “Harp. The guy was basically carved from a single block of FDA prime grade. I was proud of you. I’m still proud of you. I want details.”
I stare at my coffee, swirling it, watching the foam break apart. “I haven’t… we didn’t exchange numbers,” I say, and my voice comes out so flat I almost don’t recognize it. “I never even told him my last name. I don’t even know where he works.”
Luca’s eyebrows do a little rise. “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
He lets that hang for a second. “Are you okay with that?”
I think about it, rolling the memory over in my head like a stone, turning it until I can see all the uneven edges.
“I think so,” I say. “It was… nice. It was uncomplicated. I didn’t have to manage anything. No fallout. No drama. Just… you know.”
He grins. “Sex so good you left before dawn?”
I almost laugh again, but this time it comes out as a kind of sigh. “I left a note,” I admit. “Like a cliché.”
“Don’t knock it,” Luca says. “Some clichés exist because they’re right. Did you sign it with your full name?”
I shake my head, not admitting that he had stalked me on socials that night, so he could contact me if he really wanted to.
“God, you’re a mystery,” he says, voice full of something like admiration. “You should ghostwrite my love life.”
I take a sip of what is now officially room-temperature coffee. “You don’t need me to ghost write you a love life. You have Adrian.”
“True,” he says, but he winks at me. “And even you couldn’t dream up a man like him.”
We lapse into a comfortable silence. I watch the world filter through the windows, the little vignettes of other people’s lives around the cafe, parents with toddlers, a couple on their first or last date, a woman reading a hardcover with the dust jacket folded neatly underneath so she won’t damage it.
The world keeps turning, none the wiser to the cataclysm that just took place at table four.
After a while, Luca says, “Hey, I mean it about Ethan.”
“About burning him at the stake?”
He nods, dead serious. “I have connections. Just give the word.”
I laugh, a little louder this time, and it feels like something inside me finally unclenches. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“You do that.”
We sit there for a long time, not talking, not needing to. He keeps watch, and I keep breathing, and for a minute the universe rights itself just enough to feel bearable.
When he finally stands. to get back to work I presume, he squeezes my shoulder and says, “You are going to be okay.”
“I know,” I say, and I almost believe it.
He hesitates at the edge of the table, then says, “Next time, leave a last name. Or at least a business card. Mystery is good, but not at the expense of a perfectly nice hunk of man meat.”
I nod, promise nothing, and watch him go.
I nurse my coffee. I stare at the table, replay the conversation with Tessa, the way her eyes held tears when she realized we were both casualties of the same disaster.
I think about the way Luca looked at me, the way he never once tried to fix anything, just let me be, didn’t try to shush or soften or turn it into a joke.
I think about Alexander. The way he didn’t ask for anything. It occurs to me that, for the first time in months, I have no idea what happens next. I tuck the thought away for later, for another morning.
Then I pick up my bag, pull on my jacket, and walk out into the world that is, for all its ruin, still waiting to be written.