Chapter 3
THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE
Sloane is fourteen minutes late and I’ve already shredded my napkin into a little pile of white confetti on the tablecloth.
Our usual spot—the Greek place on Elm with the blue-painted chairs and the bread basket that shows up before you sit down.
We’ve been coming here since before Caleb, before Sloane’s rotating cast of boyfriends, back when we split a plate of saganaki and complained about our twenties like they were something happening to us.
The door swings open and she breezes in with her sunglasses still on her head. “Sorry, sorry, sorry—parking was insane.” She drops into the booth across from me and squeezes my hand across the table. “Okay. Hi. I’m here. Tell me everything. How are you and Caleb?”
“Ugh.” I tear off a piece of bread and don’t eat it. “Not great.”
Her face does the thing—brows up, mouth soft. “What happened?”
“I thought we were getting back to normal. Saturday morning he’s home, I suggest a day trip to the coast—like we used to do.
And he says yes. Sloane, he says yes. He goes to the garage and gets the cooler down and he’s putting on this playlist I made years ago and humming and his hand is on my knee in the car and I’m sitting there thinking okay, we’re okay, this is still us—and then his phone rings. ”
“No.”
“He pulls over. Goes inside. Comes back out with an overnight bag and takes off in his car.” My voice is steady because I practiced this in the car but my chest aches like it happened five minutes ago.
“Work emergency. On a Saturday morning. With sandwiches I’d made twenty minutes earlier sitting in the back seat. ”
“Mara.” She leans forward. “That is so unfair. You deserve someone who shows up.”
I wait. This is where a follow-up question would go. Did he call that night? Did you fight about it? Has he done this before?
Sloane picks up the menu she’s memorized and studies it. “Should we get the lamb? I’ve been craving the lamb.”
“Sure.”
“And the lemon potatoes. Obviously.” She catches the waiter’s eye and orders for both of us—easy, charming, the version of herself she shows to service staff and strangers—and by the time she turns back to me, the moment has passed. Sealed over, clean and smooth, like it never cracked open.
“So tell me about your guy,” I say. Letting her off the hook because I always let her off the hook.
“Mara. He is—I can’t.” She presses her palms together. “He sent me flowers on a Thursday. Not my birthday, not an anniversary, just a Thursday because—and I quote—‘I saw them and thought of you.’ Who does that?”
“That’s really sweet.” And I mean it. My chest aches but not in a bitter way—in a remembering way.
Caleb used to do things like that. First year, maybe eighteen months in, he’d show up at my office with coffee he’d driven twenty minutes out of his way to get because I mentioned a café once.
He left notes in my coat pockets. He knew my order everywhere.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to be the person someone thinks of on a random Tuesday, and hearing Sloane describe it is like pressing on a bruise I didn’t know was there.
“And last night he cooked for me. In my kitchen. He rolled up his sleeves and made this pasta from scratch—flour on the counter, the whole thing—and he opened this wine that probably cost more than my rent and we just sat at the table, eating and talking until two in the morning.”
“In your kitchen?”
“Mm-hmm.” She sips her wine, eyes bright. “He’s there a lot lately. Which, for a guy who travels as much as he does? It means something.”
A guy who travels a lot. Something tightens at the base of my skull but I don’t reach for it.
“When do I actually get to meet this guy?”
“Soon!” She waves her hand. “It’s just—it’s still early, and he’s private, and I don’t want to jinx it. But soon. I promise.”
The food comes. She talks about his hands, the way he remembers things she mentions in passing, how he makes her feel like the only person in the room.
I want that for her. I do. Sloane has dated so many men who treated her like an option, and she deserves one who treats her like a priority.
But my throat keeps tightening because everything she’s describing is what I had and lost, and she’s glowing with it while I’m sitting here with an empty cooler and a husband who can’t make it through a Saturday.
“I told my therapist that I feel like she’s the only person I talk honestly to anymore.”
Sloane’s fork pauses. One beat. Two. Then she chews, swallows, tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean my husband left me sitting in a car with a packed cooler on a Saturday morning and the only person I told the whole truth to about how that felt was a woman I pay a hundred and sixty dollars an hour. Not you. Not anyone.”
Something moves across Sloane’s face—quick, complicated, gone before I can name it. “Mara. You can always talk to me. You know that.”
“I know.” And she means it, probably. She means it the way people mean call me anytime—as a sentiment, not a true offer. A thing you say so the words exist between you, covering whatever’s underneath.
“He sounds like he treats you really well,” I say.
“He does.” The light’s back. Full wattage. “I’ve never had someone be this intentional with me, you know? Every single thing he does is on purpose.”
Intentional. On purpose. I think about Caleb packing that cooler with careful hands—ice on the bottom, waters along the sides, sandwiches in the middle. How I mistook precision for love when maybe it was just guilt dressed up in a shape I’d recognize.
“I’m happy for you,” I say.
“Thank you.” She beams at me and I can tell she believes it.
She believes I’m happy for her. She believes this lunch went fine—she showed up, she squeezed my hand, she said the right sentence.
Checked every box. And now she’s glowing across the table while I sit here holding my sadness like a bag she didn’t offer to carry.
I signal the waiter for the check. While we’re settling up, Sloane picks up her phone and grins at the screen—wide, private, the kind of smile that belongs to whoever’s on the other end of it. She types something quick with one thumb and slides the phone into her purse, still smiling.
“He’s the best,” she says. More to herself than to me.
I leave a twenty on the table and hug her on the sidewalk—tight, perfumed, her cheek warm against mine.
“Call me if you need anything,” she says. “I mean it, Mara.”
“I know you do.”
I watch her walk to her car. She doesn’t look back.
The text comes after it’s dark outside and I should be getting ready for bed.
I’m on the couch with a glass of wine and a show I stopped watching twenty minutes ago, still playing to a room I’m not paying attention to.
Caleb left this morning for Charlotte—or wherever he actually goes when he says Charlotte.
The house has that held-breath quality it gets when he’s gone, every creak and tick amplified, the refrigerator humming like it’s trying to fill the silence.
My phone buzzes on the cushion beside me. Sloane’s name and a photo.
I tap it open. A man’s wrist—shirt cuff pushed back, fingers wrapped around a champagne flute, white tablecloth visible beneath. Cropped tight. No face, no background. Just the hand, the glass, and the watch.
Guess who’s spoiling me tonight ??
I start to type something back—something light, something with an exclamation point—and my thumb stops.
I know that wrist. I know the way the tendons fan out from the knuckles, the width of the hand around the glass.
I know the small scar under the fourth knuckle—a fishing hook in college, the story he tells at every barbecue.
I’ve held that hand across restaurant tables and on road trips and in hospital waiting rooms. I’ve fallen asleep with those fingers laced through mine.
It can’t be.
I pull the photo wider with two fingers.
Zoom in until the pixels start to blur. Brushed steel case.
Black dial with the crosshair pattern. Cognac leather strap with the stitching I spent three weeks researching because I wanted it to be perfect—the 1968 Seamaster I found at an estate sale in Connecticut and had restored for our fifth anniversary.
He opened the box and his eyes went wet and he said this is the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given me and I cried because making him happy used to be the thing I was best at.
There’s a scratch on the crystal. Upper left. A hotel doorframe in Savannah, two years ago. I watched him rub his thumb over it all through dinner, upset with himself.
That scratch is in the photo.
My whole body goes cold. Not numb—the opposite. Every nerve firing at once, too much input, like touching a live wire. The wine glass is shaking in my other hand and I set it on the coffee table and miss the edge. It tips, hits the rug, rolls. Red wine soaks into the carpet and I just stare at it.
I pick up the phone and call Caleb.
Third ring. Background noise—a TV, maybe, or music. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey.” My voice comes out normal. I don’t know how. “What are you up to?”
“Just got back to the hotel. Long day. Sinclair people are killing me.” A yawn that sounds forced. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just missed you.” I press my thumbnail into my palm—same spot, same crescent from lunch. “Where’d they put you this time? That Marriott you hate?”
“The Hilton, actually. They upgraded the corporate rate.”
“Nice. Send me a picture? I want to see if it’s as depressing as the last one.”
He laughs. “You want a picture of my hotel room?”
“I want to see if there’s a view.”
“There’s a parking lot and a Chili’s. You’re not missing much.” His voice is easy, amused. Warm, even. The voice of a man with nothing to hide. “How was your day? Did you see Sloane?”
My stomach flips so hard my mouth fills with something sour. “Yeah. Lunch. She’s still obsessed with her new boyfriend.”
“Good for her.” Flat. Uninterested. Moving on. “Listen, I should crash. Early meeting tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning?”