4. Paige
— ? —
Paige
The next six weeks pass the way bad weeks do, too fast and too slow at once.
Cole plans and I watch. He books the caterer, confirms the officiant, charms my mother on the phone, and I keep my notebook and my smile and let the little heart on the calendar crawl toward us a square a day, until eight weeks becomes seven becomes a single week, and the vineyard stops being a someday and starts being a Saturday.
Cole leaves for golf at eight on Saturday morning, kissing my head, smelling like sunscreen he took the trouble to apply - details, my husband is a details man - and by eight forty I’m in line at the coffee place by Tara’s apartment ordering her oat milk latte, extra hot, the order I’ve known for fifteen years.
Surprising Tara with coffee is a thing I do. Have always done. It’s ours - hungover Sundays in college, the morning after Marcus left her, the day she got the promotion. Showing up unannounced with her latte is the least suspicious act in our entire friendship.
Which is exactly why I’m doing it.
His car isn’t in her lot.
For three whole seconds, turning in past the leasing office, relief hits me so hard I almost drop both cups - maybe golf is golf, maybe today of all days the lie is the truth - and then I see it.
One street over, visible through the gap between buildings, tucked along the curb behind a landscaping trailer.
The gray sedan.
Not in her lot, where any neighbor might mention it. Around the corner, in the shade, nose out. You don’t park like that once. You park like that the fiftieth time, when the parking itself has become procedure.
I sit in my car with two coffees going lukewarm and my heart doing something arrhythmic, and I could leave. That’s the thing. I have the text thread and the Kauai trap and the fifty-five-minute drive home - I don’t need this. Nobody needs this.
I take the stairs.
Tara answers on the third knock, and I will be seeing her face in that doorway for the rest of my life: hair up in the clip she sleeps in, cheeks flushed, wearing a silk robe at nine in the morning - a robe I don’t recognize, which shouldn’t hurt, given everything, and somehow lands on the pile anyway. Behind her, faintly, water is running.
“Paige!” One octave too high. Her hand closes the robe at the throat. “Oh my God - hi - what-”
“Latte emergency.” I hold up the cup, beaming, harmless, the oldest bit in our repertoire. “I was at the market and my hands developed a mind of their own. Bad time?”
“No! No. Never. Come-” A flick of her eyes, so fast, over her shoulder toward the hallway. Toward the water. “-come in, God, ignore the mess.”
The apartment smells like coffee already.
That’s the first thing. Coffee already made, two mugs’ worth gone from the pot, though only one mug sits in the sink.
The second thing is the shower running behind the bathroom door down the hall - steady, unhurried, the shower of a man who has not yet been informed.
“You’ve got water running,” I say, angelic.
“The shower-” Tara laughs, and the laugh comes out with a crack down the middle of it. “The landlord FINALLY sent someone. The guy’s in there now testing the pressure, it’s been a whole saga, you know it’s been a saga.”
“The faucet saga.” I settle onto her couch, cross my legs, take the lid off my coffee like a woman with nowhere to be. “I thought Mike fixed the faucet weeks ago.”
Silence. A silence with a heartbeat in it.
“The faucet, yes,” she says. “This is the shower. Different - it’s a different issue.
Old building.” She perches on the armchair across from me, knees together, robe clutched, and lifts her latte with both hands like it’s the only solid object in the room.
“You are a lifesaver, by the way. I needed this.”
“You look like you barely slept.”
“I barely did.”
“Anything wrong?”
“No! No. Just-” her hand does a vague loop, “-life.”
“Is it the Gemini?”
The latte stops an inch from her mouth. “The what?”
“The complicated man. From lunch.” I tuck my feet up under me, settling in, best friend mode, all the time in the world.
“You’ve had a glow for weeks, Tara. And now you’re not sleeping, and you’re drinking coffee at nine on a Saturday in a robe I’ve never seen, which, by the way, gorgeous, is it new?
” I reach over and rub the silk of her sleeve between two fingers.
“This is not a woman with nothing going on. Tell me about him. What’s his deal? What does he do?”
“Paige.”
“Does he stay over?” I glance around the apartment, bright, curious, a heat-seeking missile with a latte. “Is he here NOW? Oh my God, is that why you’re being weird-”
“He fixes things,” Tara says.
It comes out of her fast and flat, no décor on it, and for a second we both sit there listening to it - the first true sentence she’s handed me in seven weeks, smuggled out in plain sight, and her eyes come up to mine with an expression I can’t file anywhere: half plea, half dare, all exhaustion.
“He fixes things,” she repeats, quieter. “That’s his whole deal. Something breaks, he shows up. And it’s not going anywhere, and it was never going anywhere, and I don’t want to talk about him in this apartment. Okay? Please.”
In this apartment. Not today. Not right now. In this apartment.
“Okay,” I say gently, and pat her knee, and grant my best friend the mercy she has never once granted me. “But when you’re ready - I want to hear everything. Every detail. I mean it, Tara. I want to know exactly who he is.”
“You really don’t,” she says, and laughs, and the laugh comes out like a hostage.
Down the hall, the shower shuts off.
The apartment goes so quiet I can hear her swallow. Somewhere behind that door a man is standing on her bathmat, dripping, listening, doing the same math she’s doing, and I take a long, luxurious sip of oat milk latte and let the silence get comfortable.
“So,” I say, brightly, at a volume calibrated to carry down a hallway, “Cole’s golfing all morning, and I had a thought - we should do dinner HERE some night.
The three of us. You always come to us; I’ve barely seen this place since you redid it.
Cole’s never even seen the new kitchen, has he?
He’d love it. He loves what you’ve done. ”
From the bathroom: nothing. The specific, athletic nothing of a grown man holding still.
“He’d - sure.” Tara’s voice has gone thin as onion skin. “Sure, sometime, we should.”
“He’s so handy, too. If your landlord keeps flaking, honestly, just ask him. He’d be here with the toolbox before you hung up the phone.” I smile at her over the rim of my cup. “He’d do anything for you. You know that.”
Her eyes shine, sudden and wrong, and for one lurching second I think it’s going to happen right here - that she’s going to set down the latte and open her mouth and end all three of our lives on a Saturday morning, and God help me, part of me leans toward it like heat.
“I know,” she whispers.
The bathroom door does not open. The shower guy who is not a shower guy does not come out to be introduced.
And the clock on her wall - the sunflower clock I bought her for her thirtieth - ticks us politely through the longest four minutes in the history of coffee, until I stand, and stretch, and gather my cup.
“I’ll let you get back to your Saturday.
” At the door I hug her, and she holds on harder than the visit deserves, harder than she has in months, her fingers gripping the back of my shirt like the ledge of something.
“One week,” I say into her hair. “Vineyard’s almost here. Best seat in the house, second row.”
“Paige.” Muffled. Fierce. “I love you. You know that, right? Whatever - no matter what. You know that.”
“Nobody loves me like you do,” I tell her, which has the advantage of being the truest sentence spoken in this doorway all morning, and she pulls back and searches my face and finds nothing there but her best friend, because I have gotten so good at this that I frighten myself.
In my car, I don’t start the engine. I take out my phone.
Me: how’s golf?? ???
Through the gap between buildings, past the landscaping trailer, the gray sedan sits in the shade. I watch the three dots appear. Disappear. Appear.
Cole: Just teed off on 9! Miller’s slicing everything, it’s a bloodbath ? home by 2, love you
Home by two. It’s 9:40 a.m. Whatever’s left on today’s agenda, they’ve budgeted four hours for it, and hole nine exists thirty feet above my head behind a bathroom door with the fan still running.
Me: love you too. tell Miller I said hi
I drive home the long way, windows down, and somewhere around the reservoir I finally say it out loud, alone in the car, the first time I’ve let the words exist in air:
“My husband is sleeping with my best friend.”
The steering wheel takes it fine. The reservoir doesn’t care. The words just sit there in the passenger seat, buckled in, riding home with me like they’ve always had the seat.
One week.
At two o’clock exactly, Cole walks in sunburned - actually sunburned, the man commits, he must have sat on a patio somewhere baking himself for verisimilitude - and drops his golf bag by the door.
“Do not ask me about the front nine.”
“How was the front nine?”
“Brutal. Cruel. A war crime.” He comes into the kitchen, pulls a beer, holds it against his pink neck. “But the back nine, Paige. The back nine.”
“Tell me about the back nine.” I keep chopping basil, wife-shaped, encouraging, and he’s off - and this is a thing I do now, I’ve discovered, a hobby, a sickness: I make him elaborate.
I ask follow-up questions and watch my husband build lies the way other men build model ships, lovingly, detail by detail, rigging every thread.
“Birdie on fourteen. The par three over the water - you remember, the one that ate my bag in ’19? Seven iron, pin high, eight feet, drained it. Miller lost his mind.”
“How’s Miller’s slice?”
“Tragic. He put three in the trees on eleven alone. We’re staging an intervention.”
“You should have him and Dana over after the renewal. It’s been forever.”
The beer pauses at his lips - one half-second of recalculation, Miller and Dana at our table, alibi and audit in the same room - and then, smooth: “After the honeymoon-week thing. Whenever that is. Whatever we’re doing.” A wink. Keep the calendar open. “You’re the boss.”
“Fourteen, though,” I say, sliding the basil into the pan. “Look at you.”
“What can I say.” My husband steals a leaf, kisses my cheek, tastes like someone else’s mouthwash. “When it matters, I show up.”
One week, I think, watching him walk away whistling. One week, in front of everyone we know.
So do I.