12. Chapter 11
Liv Strauss
The morning shift at Clockwork Tavern is supposed to be prep work. Restocking. Inventory counts. The kind of mindless physical labor that lets your brain wander wherever it wants to go.
But my brain does not want to wander today. My brain wants to stay exactly where it is, replaying the word simulated like a song stuck on repeat.
Kevin is not in yet. The familiar smell of the bar usually settles something in my chest. Today it does not settle anything. I cut limes until my fingers sting from the acid. I polish glasses that do not need polishing. I reorganize the top shelf twice.
My phone sits on the back counter where I can see it.
8:14. Missed call from Zoltan.
8:22. Missed call from Zoltan.
8:31. Text from Zoltan: "Liv. Please call me."
8:47. Missed call from Zoltan.
I do not call him. I do not text him back. I cut more limes.
The thing about trust is that it does not break clean. It does not snap in half like a bone. It crumbles. Piece by piece. One revelation at a time.
The background check was a crack. The NDA is something else. The NDA is the moment you realize that the crack was not a crack at all. It was a fault line. It was there the whole time, running under everything, and you just did not know how to look for it.
Simulated.
I think about the way his hand flattened against his jacket pocket when he watched Missy do that puzzle.
I think about the forty minutes earlier he started coming home.
I think about the coffee-and-cedar scent that hit me every time he passed within two feet of me, which was more often than it needed to be.
I think about Missy's face when I braided her hair before school. The way she said the lime lady and cracked something open in my chest that I have not been able to close since.
Professional purposes.
Right.
I finish the limes. I start on the lemons.
9:15. Missed call from Zoltan.
I text my coworker James: "Can you cover the evening shift? I'll leave the key under the mat."
He responds with a thumbs up emoji. I pocket my phone and go back to the lemons.
At 10:30, I lock up the bar and walk six blocks to the diner where Piper used to work before she started taking classes full-time.
They still have my application on file from when I needed extra shifts three months ago.
The manager, Rosa, looks at me like she knows something is wrong but does not ask.
She hands me an apron and points me toward the coffee station.
I pour coffee for strangers. I take orders. I smile at people who do not deserve it and deliver pancakes to tables with sticky syrup rings. The work is different from the bar but the rhythm is the same: move, serve, file, do not react.
My phone stays in my apron pocket. I do not check it.
The thing is, I knew. I knew from the beginning that this was complicated.
I knew from the first day I signed that conduct agreement that I was walking into something that had edges I could not see.
But I told myself I was walking in with my eyes open.
I told myself I was making a choice, not being managed.
The NDA tells a different story. The NDA tells me that somewhere in a legal document, in language drafted by lawyers who have never met me, the thing between us has been reduced to a variable. A simulated relationship. A professional arrangement that served its purpose and now requires containment.
I think about the terrace again. The stone railing against my back. The city lights spread beneath us like something I was not supposed to have. The way it was already too late to be careful.
Was that simulated too?
The lunch rush hits at noon and I do not have time to think about anything except keeping up.
Coffee refills. Burger orders. A woman who sends her eggs back twice because the yolks are not runny enough.
I smile and apologize and bring her new eggs and do not think about the word simulated for almost forty-five minutes straight.
Then the rush ends and I am standing behind the counter with nothing to do but wipe down the already-clean coffee machine, and it all comes back.
At 2:15, Rosa gives me a fifteen-minute break. I sit in the back hallway near the employee bathroom and check my phone for the first time in four hours.
Eleven missed calls from Zoltan.
Three texts from Petra.
One text from Piper: Z's been calling me. What's going on? I’m coming over.
I stare at Piper's message. He called my sister. He called my twenty-year-old sister who lives on my pull-out couch and studies biology textbooks until morning and has nothing to do with any of this.
I text Piper back: Don't answer. I'll explain when you get here.
Then I put my phone away and go back to pouring coffee.
The thing about the police station two years ago is that I do not talk about it.
Not to Piper, not to anyone. But I remember it.
I remember sitting in that grey room with the fluorescent lights and the metal table and the detective who kept asking me the same questions in slightly different words, like if he rephrased them enough times I would eventually give him a different answer.
I remember the specific cold that settled into my bones when I realized that the man I had trusted had been running a scam from my register for six months. That he had used my access. My schedule. My name on forms I had never signed.
I remember the feeling of having less information than everyone else in the room. Of being the only person who did not know the full picture. Of trusting someone who had cataloged every piece of my life and then used it against me.
The NDA feels like that.
Different circumstances. Different man. Same cold.
At 5:30, I’m finally on a break. I lean against the back counter, staring through the glass at the streets outside, wishing I was walking home the long way. Past the bodegas and laundromats and the Korean place that always smells like sesame oil.
Piper is sitting at the far end of the counter when I blink the street away, her face the specific combination of worried and annoyed that means she has been waiting for me.
"What happened?" she asks.
"He sent me an NDA."
"A what?"
"Non-disclosure agreement. Sixteen pages. Legal language. Basically says that everything that happened between us was simulated for professional purposes and I am not allowed to talk about it."
Piper stares at me. "Simulated?"
"That's the word they used."
"They used that word? In a legal document?"
"Page four, third paragraph."
"Liv," she says quietly. "That's not what happened."
"I know what happened."
"Do you? Because you've been looking like you're about to cry, and you never cry."
"I'm not going to cry."
"You're also not going to call him back."
"No."
Piper sighs. "Remember what you told me after the thing with Mom? After she promised she was clean and then she wasn't?"
I do not answer. I know where this is going.
"You said that people show you who they are," Piper continues. "And that the smart thing is to believe them the first time."
"That's different."
"Is it?"
"He ran a background check on me," I say. "Before I said twenty words to him. He knew about the fraud case. About you. About my debt. He knew everything, and he never told me."
"That's not great."
"And then he sent a legal document that calls what happened between us simulated."
"Also not great."
"So what part of this am I supposed to believe?"
Piper is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "The part where he called me twelve times today trying to find you."
I close my eyes. "That doesn't mean anything," I say.
"It means something."
"It means he's trying to manage the situation. Control the variables. That's what he does."
"Or it means he's scared."
I open my eyes. Piper is looking at me with the expression she gets when she thinks I am being stubborn about something that matters. It is an expression I know well. I have been seeing it my whole life.
"He doesn't get scared," I say.
"Everyone gets scared."
I do not have an answer to that.
"You going to talk to him?" she asks.
"No."
"Liv."
"I said no."
Piper watches me for a long moment.
"Fine," she says.
The word hangs between us, heavy and hollow, under the buzz of the diner lights. None of this is fine.