Chapter 32
Chapter thirty-two
Tessa
Iarrive at the ERS office forty minutes before anyone else. My badge swipes with a soft click, and the lobby greats me. Grey carpet, grey light, the silence of a building before the staff arrive.
The fluorescents hum overhead. I stand under them for a moment, letting the cold light settle over everything.
I pull up three client files at once. I don't need all three, and some part of me knows that, but blank screen space has started to feel like an accusation.
The coffee machine in the break room gurgles and spits through its cycle, and the sound of it almost steadies me.
I pour a cup and wrap both hands around it and stand there being a normal person having a normal morning, which works for approximately forty seconds.
Work, I remind myself, heading back to my desk. I'm here to work.
I open Camden and Lila's media summary and read the same paragraph twice without retaining a single word. The letters are just shapes. I close it and open it again.
On my second coffee run I take the long hallway route.
George's name is on the frosted glass of his office door, printed in the same clean sans-serif it has always been. It's such an ordinary thing. Just letters. Just a name.
I stop walking. Not for long, just for a second.
I know he's not coming in today. I know this. And yet some stupid, optimistic chamber of my chest half-expects the door to open anyway, expects him to appear with his coffee and his slightly-wrong collar and whatever low-grade disaster he'd be in the middle of narrating.
The hallway gives me nothing back.
I keep walking. I keep my cup level. I do not look behind me.
Back at my desk, I finally manage to read the Camden and Lila summary properly, and the news is good.
The press cycle has softened, the narrative has shifted, the machine is working.
I feel the mild, competent satisfaction of a doctor reviewing a clean scan.
Professional. Contained. Completely fine.
Arthur and Lindsay's file shows a recovery curve faster than I projected, and I let myself have a small, private moment of pride about that, the quiet kind that doesn't need an audience.
One of our newest couples has requested a contract extension. Which means the system works. Which means I built something real, something that actually functions, something that holds people together.
I close the folder and rest my hands flat on the desk and wait for the satisfaction to arrive properly.
It doesn't.
I have spent years helping people choose each other, I think, and I am apparently catastrophically bad at being chosen.
The thought doesn't arrive with any particular drama. It just settles there, factual and unhurried, which is somehow so much worse than if it had hurt loudly.
Marissa materialises at the edge of my desk with her lanyard still swinging, freshly badged-in, carrying the specific energy of someone who has had one coffee too many already. "Ready for wedding weekend chaos?"
I smile the smile I have been smiling since roughly the age of nine, the one that is warm and competent and reveals nothing. "Always."
She keeps walking, already onto her next thought, her voice trailing back to me about logistics I'm not tracking. I watch her go and think: the mask is the most reliable thing about me.
I glance back at my screen. The sentence I just typed in the Camden file is a masterpiece of saying absolutely nothing. I delete it without ceremony.
My phone lights up with Eleanor's name. It's a voice note, thirty-seven seconds. I press play.
Her voice is giddy and slightly breathless, the way she gets when she's been up too late being happy.
She tells me Daniel reorganized the entire welcome bag system at midnight and made a spreadsheet, Tessa, a spreadsheet, and she sounds so completely, helplessly in love with this man and his midnight spreadsheets that I have to set the phone face-down on the desk.
I stare at the ceiling tiles.
You deserve this, I think. You deserve someone who makes spreadsheets at midnight for you.
The voice note is still going, muffled now through the desk, Eleanor's voice reminding me about the bachelorette party tonight, and I sigh once, quietly, at no one.
***
The wine bar Eleanor chose is warm and dim and smells like dried roses and candles. The moment I push through the door she crosses the room and grabs both my hands like she's been waiting specifically for me, like I'm the thing that makes it real.
"You look tired," she says, studying my face.
Coming from Eleanor, that's I love you and I see you and I'm watching, all compressed into three words. She has never once learned to be subtle about caring.
"I look polished," I correct her.
She laughs and pulls me toward the table, and for a moment the warmth of her hand around mine is enough.
Beth is already two glasses in, holding court with magnificent authority. Eleanor has one eye on her at all times with the weary, fond attention of someone who loves a person exactly as they are and is also slightly braced for what's coming.
Daniel's sister is at the far end of the table, quieter than the rest. I met her yesterday, and I liked her immediately.
The table fills quickly with the noise of women who genuinely like each other, laughter crossing laughter, everyone talking and no one minding. For a few minutes I stop performing. I just sit inside it and let it be enough.
Eleanor is mid-story about the florist disaster (something involving a miscommunication about peonies that spiralled into what sounds like a minor standoff) and the way her hands move when she talks, wide and theatrical, pulls the entire table toward her like gravity.
"He fixed it himself," she says, quieter now, meaning Daniel. The story shifts register in her voice, becomes something softer. "He saw it was bothering me, and he went and sorted it out for me."
That's the whole thing, isn't it. Someone who sees the problem and fixes it without needing credit, without needing you to witness it. Someone who does it because they care.
Beth tops up my glass with enormous ceremony, rises halfway from her chair in a way that suggests she has rehearsed this moment internally, and announces: "To Eleanor, who is about to be extremely, annoyingly happy."
The table toasts with immediate enthusiasm. Eleanor covers her face with both hands and laughs into her palms, shoulders shaking, and she looks so luminously, defencelessly joyful that it almost physically hurts to look at her.
I drink, and I smile, and I mean it, and I ache. All at once, in equal measure, taking up the same space.
Beth turns to me with the particular gleam of someone who has had a thought and has decided not to vet it first. "You're next."
The laughter from the table is immediate and reflexive. It's the automatic group response to a familiar joke. But I feel it land somewhere low and quiet in my chest, like a key turning in the wrong lock.
Eleanor's foot connects with Beth's shin under the table. I can tell by the precise trajectory of Eleanor's shoulder and the small, wounded sound Beth makes.
"Beth." One word, one tone, the kind of delivery that communicates an entire conversation in a single syllable.
Beth's eyes go wide and then remorseful. "Sorry. I didn't mean—"
"It's fine," I say, already smiling, already waving my hand, already positioned approximately six inches above my own body watching myself be completely fine about it.
Eleanor watches me do this. She doesn't say anything, but she watches.
I refill Beth's glass partly because I'm generous and partly to redirect the table's collective attention, which works beautifully because Beth is, always and reliably, Beth.
***
An hour later the party has slid into the comfortable, slow part of the evening. The candles have burned lower. The voices are quieter. Someone has started a playlist that's mostly songs from a decade ago, and no one has complained.
Eleanor leans her head against my shoulder. "I can't believe this is actually happening."
I squeeze her hand.
She chose someone, I think, and he chose her back, and neither of them flinched.
I look into my wine glass, at the slow dark swirl of it, and finally let the thought I have been organising all day arrive in full.
George never got to choose me. I decided what he would choose before he ever had the question.
I told myself it was practicality, self-awareness.
That I was protecting us both from something messy and uncertain.
But it wasn't. I was only ever protecting myself from the specific, particular humiliation of being someone's hesitation.
The candle on the table gutters once, catches itself, and keeps burning.
Tomorrow is Eleanor's wedding. George will be there in a suit, possibly with his collar slightly askew. He will be there, and I will see him, and I will have to exist in the same room as every choice I didn't make.
I finish my wine and set the glass down gently on the table, and I listen to Eleanor laugh at something Beth just said, full-throated and unguarded, the laugh of someone who has stopped waiting for the other shoe.
George is no longer mine to lose.
Because I never let him choose me.