4. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
A familiar weight drapes over my waist when I wake up, and for one blurred second, I’ve forgotten why my chest already hurts.
Tristan is a warm line against my back, the way he’s slept a thousand nights.
His hand is loose against my stomach, his breath slow and even in my hair.
My body knows this shape. For two years, it’s been the safest place I own.
Any other morning I’d sink back into it and let myself be held until one of us gave in and started the day.
Then the rest of it settles back over me, the whole weight of last night, and with it the truth I’ve been working so hard not to look at.
Because there’s a crack running through us. There has been for a while. I’ve gotten good at stepping around it, at telling myself it was the album, the schedule, a rough patch that would pass the way rough patches do. But last night it split too wide to keep pretending.
His words are still sitting in the dark where he left them hours ago, the I love you that I didn’t say back because I couldn’t. And a thing that scares me more than any of it, is how little that silence surprised me.
So instead of sinking back, I lift his arm off my waist and slide out from under it.
It’s a small thing, it shouldn’t feel like anything. But I feel the exact moment he registers it in his sleep, the way his hand reaches after me on instinct across the empty sheet, and I make myself keep moving.
Behind me the mattress shifts.
“Lily?” His voice is thick with sleep, confused.
When I glance back he’s pushing up on one elbow, hair a disaster, blinking at the space where I used to be, and there’s a look on his face I’ve never had to see before. Not quite hurt but more of a man realizing things changed while he was asleep.
In every version of this morning we’ve ever had, I was the one who stayed in bed too long. He was the one who had to leave.
This time it’s different.
“I’m going to shower,” I say.
“Oh.” A beat and a pause. “Okay. Are you… do you want me to make coffee? We said we’d talk so if…”
“We will.” I gather the hem of the dress in one hand, this dress, the one I put on for a dinner he never came to, that I’ve now slept in twice and can’t stand the feel of another minute. “Just let me wake up first. I want to be fully awake before everything.”
I don’t wait for his answer. I go into the bathroom and shut the door, and I stand under the water as hot as I can take it and try to scrub the last few days off my skin.
He’s making coffee when I come out, dressed and dry, my armor more or less back in place. Two mugs, and I can tell by the careful way he sets mine down that he’s watching me, gauging me, trying to read what kind of morning this is going to be.
“Thanks.” I take the mug and wrap both hands around it.
“Yeah. Of course.” He shifts his weight. He keeps a careful arm’s length between us, moving around me as if the floor might give way, and it’s strange to see Tristan, who has never once been unsure of his welcome in a room, treating me as someone who might spook. “Did you, um… Did you sleep okay?”
“Not really.”
“No. Me neither.” He drags a hand through his hair. The silence stretches, and I let it, because I’m done being the one who fills it. Finally, he sets his own mug down and turns to face me entirely, and I can see him deciding to just say it. “Lily. About what happened…”
I don’t say anything and I just wait for what he will say about it.
“I was at the studio all night. I was actually on my way home at first but they wouldn’t let me leave until I finished a track because of some scheduling thing for the show, and I was so deep in it I had my phone face down for hours.
I didn’t see any of it.” His voice tightens.
“I didn’t even know the thing had leaked until Ford told me I was trending. ”
My eyes lift to meet his and hold them.
“I didn’t know,” he says, quieter now, stepping closer. “I swear to you I didn’t know it was out there. And that song, whatever the internet is deciding it means, it doesn’t mean any of that. It’s old and it’s nothing and I…”
The doorbell rings.
We both go still. Tristan stops mid-sentence, and I watch the frustration flash across his face before he masks it.
“You’re expecting someone?” I ask.
“No.” He shakes his head, and there’s an emotion almost desperate in it. “No, I’m not expecting anyone. I want to do this. I want to talk it out with you, right now, I don’t care who’s at the…”
His phone lights up on the counter between us, buzzing against the stone. He picks it up before I can see the screen, and I watch his jaw tighten.
“It’s Ford.” He says it carefully, the way you’d tell someone bad news. “He’s here. He’s at the door.”
I don’t say anything. I just look at the phone in his hand, then at the door, then back at him, and I let the quiet do the talking. My arms fold over my chest without my deciding to. Whatever happens next, I want to see him choose it himself, no nudging from me.
He sets the phone face down on the counter as if that settles it. “I’m not answering. We’re in the middle of…”
The doorbell rings again, then a third time, quick and insistent.
“I guess it’s your work again.” My voice comes out flat.
“Lily.” He winces. “Let me just… I’ll go send him away. Thirty seconds. I mean it.”
He crosses to the door, and I stay where I am, but the penthouse is open enough that I hear all of it anyway.
The door opening, Ford’s voice pouring in before Tristan can get a word out, warm and relentless, the label, the staging, the interview that got moved, the encore approvals that only Tristan can sign off on.
All of it landing in that practiced rhythm that never once leaves room to say no.
Then Ford spots me over Tristan’s shoulder, and his whole face rearranges.
“Lily! Sweetheart…” He steps past Tristan into the entryway without being asked, because Ford has never once waited to be asked.
“Believe me, I know the timing is criminal, and I said as much in the car. I told them, I said… the man needs one morning with his wife, is that so much? And here I am anyway, so you can imagine how bad it is.”
I don’t answer. I keep my arms folded and watch him work.
“But you understand this business better than half the people I deal with.” He sets his tablet on the console. “Weeks out until the concert and the whole thing is barely holding together. There is exactly one person who can truly fix it and he’s standing right here in his socks.”
Tristan shifts by the door. “Ford.”
“I’m just being honest with her, she can handle it.” Ford turns back to me, and his voice turns exaggeratedly sweet. “You’re a great wife, Lily. You’ve never been one of those who throws a fit every time he has to work and I know how supportive you are. I’m sure you understand, right?”
There it is. Wrapped so neatly as if it’s a compliment.
I look at him, at the easy smile and the tablet already claiming space in my home, and I recognize exactly what he’s doing. He’s handing me a role and telling me I’ve always played it beautifully, forcing me to keep playing it.
Be a good wife, don’t be difficult, smile and hand him over and let yourself be praised for how little you ask.
My face heats. I glance at Tristan, standing there in his socks in the home we’re supposed to share, saying nothing, and the wanting rises up hot in my chest. I want to tell Ford precisely where he can put his morning-with-his-wife.
More than that, I want Tristan to do it himself. I want him to plant his feet in his own house for one single morning and say no, even if I never ask him to, even if I never beg for it.
“Ford, give me a minute.” Tristan’s voice is low, strained. “You can’t just barge in here. This isn’t…”
Ford doesn’t argue. He just steps in close and says a few words at Tristan’s ear, quiet, quick, a hand landing on his shoulder.
I don’t catch any of it and I don’t need to.
I watch it move across my husband’s face instead, the way his eyes sharpen, the way whatever Ford just promised him lands as if it’s a hook and it sets.
At that, I already know.
I’ve stood in this exact moment enough times to read the ending before we get there. He turns to me, and his mouth opens, and I can see the shape of the apology forming and I can’t stand to sit through the whole performance of it.
“It’s okay.” I say it before he can. Flat, quiet, letting him off the hook the way I always do, because it’s easier than making him watch me be disappointed. “You don’t have to explain.”
His face falls, because he knows me, and he knows it’s the furthest thing from okay in my whole vocabulary.
“It’s not what you think.” He crosses back to me anyway, lowering his voice, leaving Ford waiting by the open door. “It’s the leak. They think they can get ahead of it if I move now, and I need it gone, Lily, for you… for us.”
He reaches up and cups the side of my head, presses a kiss into my hair, lets it linger as if the softness of it might buy back the leaving. “I’ll fix this. I promise I’ll fix all of it.”
Another promise. I’ve got a whole folder of them and I’m not sure I believe him anymore.
I step back out of the kiss.
“Just go.” I turn toward the window so I don’t have to watch him do it. “Since your work is so important.”
The sarcasm lands exactly where I aim it. Behind me I hear him breathe out my name once, low and wounded but I don’t turn around. I don’t see him off. I’ve seen him off enough times to last a lifetime, and I’m all out of waving from doorways.
His footsteps cross the floor. A murmur, Ford’s voice again, pleased. The door opens, and closes, and the lock clicks as the penthouse folds back into that enormous quiet that’s become the truest thing about my marriage.
I stand at the window with my cold coffee and my armor with the conversation we never finished all while I listen to my husband leave.
***
By afternoon, the quiet has teeth.