Chapter 10 #2
Sophie does a small laugh — not quite relaxed, not quite awkward.
She's still careful around him. There's a weight between them that neither of them talks about, and I don't push it.
She gives him a little wave, he gives her a little nod, and whatever is between them gets filed away for later — as it always does.
Then she turns to me and does the thing Sophie does, which is see me. Not elaborate — just a beat where her eyes register something and then she decides whether to say it.
Camille left twenty minutes ago. The apartment smells like her soup. Poutine is on the bookshelf, judging the room with her usual contempt.
"You look nice," Sophie says.
It's a simple sentence. She means it. But there's a frequency underneath it — a vibration that only fourteen years of friendship can detect — that says: Why do you look like you're going to a meeting?
"Thanks. How was Toronto?"
"Terrible." She sits at the kitchen table where my laptop is still open to Derek's bistro branding suite, revision 7.
"The client wanted the campaign to be 'authentic but also aspirational' which is, as you know, every client's way of saying 'I don't know what I want but I'll know it when I hate what you show me. '"
I laugh. A real one. The first one today.
We sit. She tells me about the hotel that smelled like chlorine and the pitch meeting where her boss said "synergy" fourteen times.
I tell her about Derek and his wife's opinions and revision 7 of a visual identity that should have been locked three weeks ago.
We don't talk about the kitchen floor. We don't talk about smoke alarms. For twenty minutes, we're just two women complaining about work, and the knot loosens by one notch.
Then Sophie looks at me. Really looks.
"Nor."
"Hmm?"
"You're doing it."
I know what she means. I know exactly what she means. I keep my face neutral.
"Doing what?"
She doesn't answer right away. She picks up her tea — I made her tea, in the correct mug, the one without a chip, because even my hospitality has been optimized today — and she takes a sip and she says, very quietly:
"You know."
And I do. I know. Sophie has watched me do this since we were nineteen — the emergency rebuild, the version of me that shows up after something breaks and fixes everything except the thing that actually broke.
She's seen it after breakups, after bad freelance quarters, after the time I completely blanked during a client presentation and then spent three weeks being so aggressively competent that my old creative director told me to "relax, you're making everyone nervous. "
"I'm fine," I say.
Sophie watches me for another beat. Then she nods — filing it away for later.
She changes the subject. We talk about her cat.
She stays another hour. She hugs me at the door, and the hug lasts one second longer than her usual hugs, and in that extra second I feel the thing she isn't saying press against my collarbone like a hand.
She leaves. I close the door. I press my back against it and stand there for exactly four seconds, which is the amount of time I allow myself before I go back to being someone who is handling everything.
It's almost 10 PM when I finally let the bathroom door close behind me.
Ethan's asleep. Really asleep this time — I checked. The apartment is quiet the way apartments are quiet in deep winter in Montreal: the baseboard heater clicking once and then going still, the fridge humming, the snow ticking against the window.
I turn on the light.
The bathroom is small — shower-over-tub, the grab bar I installed before he came home, the raised toilet seat, the non-slip mat with its corners starting to curl.
His shampoo on the shelf. My conditioner next to it.
The intimacy of shared bathroom space without the intimacy of sharing anything that matters.
I look at the mirror.
The woman looking back is impeccable. Foundation still smooth.
Mascara unsmudged. Lip color faded but evenly, how expensive products are supposed to fade — graceful, controlled, still giving.
She looks like a woman who had a fine day.
A normal day. A day where a man's sister came to cook and a friend came to visit and nothing at all happened that left a mark.
I hate her.
Quietly. With the exhausted kind — the kind that sits down in you and doesn't have the energy to leave.
I turn on the tap. I wet a cotton pad. I start taking her apart.
Foundation first. Then concealer. Layer by layer, the day comes off — the competence, the handling of things, the correct mug, the perfect posture, the joke about Camille's cooking, the lie to Sophie. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
Underneath, there she is. Blotchy. Tired.
Eyes that are too red from a night of bad sleep and a day of working too hard at being fine.
The flour is gone but the girl who had flour on her face is still here, still sitting on a kitchen floor somewhere inside me, still saying things to cats that she can't say to people.
My legs give. I just stop trusting them. I sit on the edge of the tub. Then I slide to the floor. My back against the tub. My knees up. The cotton pad in my hand, stained with the day.
The tap is still running. I should turn it off.
I don't.
The water runs. The mirror fogs at the edges. Somewhere in the apartment, Bagel makes a sound — a small, questioning trill, the sound he makes when he's looking for someone.
I don't know how to stop. And he already has people who know where the bay leaves are.
The mirror is half-fogged now. The woman in the visible half has mascara tracks on her cheeks. The concealer missed a spot under her left eye.
She looks like me.
I close my eyes.