27. Vera
Sloane stares at us. Back and forth.
“How long?”
Kane and I exchange a glance.
“How. Long.” Her voice cracks.
“Six weeks,” Kane says.
“Six—” Sloane’s face goes white. “Six weeks?”
“Oh my god.” She takes a step back. “Tuesday.”
I stop breathing.
“Tuesday morning.” She stares at me like she’s seeing a stranger. “You came to my apartment. With bagels and coffee. You said you didn’t see my calls until morning.”
“But that was a lie.” Her voice shakes. “You were here. In his bed. While I was crying on my couch because I lost a client and I needed my best friend and you—”
She stops. Swallows.
“You were here.”
“Sloane—”
“I needed you.” The scream tears out of her. Raw and sudden. “And you were too busy to care!”
“That’s not—“ Kane steps forward.
“And you.” She rounds on him. The scream gone as fast as it came, replaced by something colder.
“I spent weeks texting you about Lisa. Planning dinners. Telling you how perfect she’d be for you.
Going on about it to Vera, to Marcel, to anyone who’d listen.
You knew the entire time and you said nothing. ”
“I tried to—”
“You let me make a fool of myself.” She cuts him off. “You let me believe I was doing something good.”
She looks back at me.
“I told you about Sidney.”
Her voice barely above a whisper.
“My best friend. Who dated my brother. Who I lost because of it.” She doesn’t blink.
“I sat across from you and told you what that cost me. And you sat there and listened and you were already doing it. Already living the thing I was warning you about. You were already her. You were already Sidney, and I was telling you the story like you didn’t already know the ending. ”
“I wanted to tell you—”
“That Wednesday.” The word lands flat. “I asked you. I looked at you across that table and I asked if it involved me.” She holds my eyes. “And you said no.”
I can’t speak.
“I handed it to you. I was sitting right there and you looked at me and said no, and I believed you. Because you’re my best friend.” Her voice cracks on the last word.
“And then that Friday.” She laughs — the wrong kind, hollow. “You came over. I showed you Claire’s photo. I talked about Kane for an hour. You were going on a date with him the next night and you sat there and nodded.”
She presses her hand to her mouth for a moment. Drops it.
“Every single time you chose the lie.”
“The gala.”
Kane goes still beside me.
“I brought you to that gala.” Her eyes come back to mine. “I introduced him to Lisa right in front of you. I told you he deserved someone uncomplicated.” A beat of silence. “I said that to your face.”
She turns to Kane.
“Sloane—”
“Vera disappeared.” Her voice is calm. “Halfway through the night. I couldn’t find her. I went looking for you.”
She finds him with her eyes.
“I found you in a back viewing room. I asked if you’d seen her.”
The silence is airless.
“He wasn’t alone in there.” Not a question. Her gaze moves back to me, slow and certain. “Was he.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes.
“I was looking for you. And when you said you’d been outside getting air, I believed you. Because why wouldn’t I.” She stops. Turns back to Kane. “And you helped me look.” Her voice drops to almost nothing. “I thanked you for being a good brother.”
Neither of us says anything.
She looks at us — both of us, side by side in the wreckage of everything she’s just reconstructed — and the last of her composure gives out. She looks back at me.
“Gerald.”
The word lands like a stone.
She says it again, quieter. Not to me — to herself. I watch her go back through it. Every time she asked how’s Gerald with that same smile. Every time I let her be delighted.
Her hand goes to her mouth.
“Every text.” Her voice cracks open. “Every time I asked how it was going. Every time I told you I was happy for you. Every time I said he sounded different.” She looks at Kane. Then back at me. “She saved you in her phone with a fake name. Did you know that?”
She answers before either of us can. “Of course you knew.”
“Did you laugh about it? Some private joke about how long it would take me to figure it out. How I kept asking. How happy I was for her.” Her voice splinters. “How stupid I was.”
“That’s not—“ Kane takes a step forward.
She takes a step back. “Don’t.”
“Answer me one thing.” Her voice drops. The crying almost gone, replaced by something exhausted and final. “Is this love? Or are you both finally scratching an itch you’ve had for years?”
I look at Kane.
He looks at me.
But the words stick. Because we haven’t said them to each other yet.
Kane’s jaw works. “We haven’t—“
“Oh my god.” Sloane’s face goes pale. “You destroyed everything and you don’t even know if it’s love.”
A breath.
“Figure it out.” She crouches down, picks her keys up from the floor with shaking hands, and straightens. “Because if you put me through this for something that burns out in three months, I will never forgive either of you.”
“Sloane—” I take a step forward.
She turns back.
Not rage. Not the screaming from before. Just Sloane — mascara running, keys clutched in both hands — looking at me with nothing but grief.
“I thought you were my best friend.” Barely a voice at all. “But the person I knew wouldn’t have looked me in the eye on that Wednesday and said no. Wouldn’t have come over that Friday and watched me show her a photo.” A breath. “Every time I gave you a way out. Every time you chose to keep lying.”
She stops.
“I don’t know who you are right now. And I don’t know if I can forgive that.”
The elevator pings.
She steps in. The doors close on her face — not angry, just devastated, just Sloane, just the person who has known me better than anyone for nine years — and then she’s gone.
The silence that crashes in is absolute.
I stare at the closed doors. At the cardamom rolls scattered across the hardwood. The breakfast she brought to surprise her brother, rolled into corners, settled against cabinet legs.
She was happy when she bought those.
The thought arrives simple and complete.
I don’t feel myself go down. One moment I’m standing and then the floor is under my knees and the rolled cardamom scattered around me and I can’t — my lungs have forgotten the order of things.
In first, then out, that’s how it works, that’s how it’s always worked, but there’s just this locked, airless nothing where breathing used to be, and the closed doors, and nine years, and I don’t know who you are right now—
“I lost her.” The words come out strangled. “Oh god, I lost Sloane—”
Kane’s down beside me before I finish the sentence.
“Vera.” His hands find my face. Tilt it up. “Right here. Look at my eyes.”
I find them. Gray. Steady. Here.
“In.” He breathes it with me — slow, exaggerated, like we have all the time in the world and the floor isn’t covered in her rolls and she didn’t just—
My chest hitches. Fails.
“Again. In.”
Something gives. A fraction. The locked thing loosening slightly under the pressure of his voice.
“Out.”
My lungs shudder and release.
“In.”
The room stops tilting by degrees. His thumbs move against my cheekbones in slow circles, the same rhythm as the breathing, and I follow it because it’s there and he’s there and right now that’s the only thing I can hold onto.
“Out.”
And again.
And again.
Gradually the edges of the room come back. The floor under my knees. His hands, warm and certain on my face. The silence where her voice was.
Then the breath finds me fully — one real one, all the way down — and that’s when the tears come.
Not the controlled kind. Not the quiet kind. My whole body shakes with it, great heaving sobs that have no shape, no language, just nine years and her face and I don’t know who you are right now coming out of me in waves I can’t stop and don’t try to.
Kane pulls me against his chest and I go.
Both hands fisting in his shirt. My face pressed into him.
The sobs tearing through me one after another after another while he wraps around me and holds on — not trying to stop it, not shushing me, just there, solid and certain, his hand moving in slow passes up and down my back while I fall completely apart against him.
I cry until there’s nothing left.
Until the waves space out and slow and my breathing comes ragged and uneven through the wreckage of it.
Until all that’s left is the wet front of his shirt and his arms still around me and the cardamom rolls scattered across the floor and the quiet where my best friend used to be.
We stay there. I don’t know how long.
At some point my breathing evens out. Kane feels it — the shift in my body when the worst of it passes — and without a word he stands, drawing me up with him, and leads me to the couch.
Wraps a blanket around my shoulders. Goes to make tea like boiling water is a form of action, like doing something small is better than doing nothing at all.
I let him.
When he comes back and sits beside me, we’re quiet for a long moment.
“She asked if it’s love,” he says finally.
“Yeah.”
“And we couldn’t answer her.”
“No.”
He sets his mug down. Turns to face me.
“I couldn’t say it like that,” he says. “Pressured. Defensive. As proof. It would have been using it wrong.”
“I know. I felt it too.”
“But I need to say it now.” He reaches for my hand.
“Not for her. Not as an argument. Just because it’s true and I’ve been waiting for the right moment and I’m done waiting.
” His thumb strokes across my knuckles. “I kept waiting. For the perfect time. The perfect setting. Clean air and no complications. And all the waiting did was make everything worse.” He meets my eyes. “I’m not waiting anymore.”
My throat is tight.
“I’m in love with you.” The words come out steady.
Certain. “Not falling. In love. Completely and terrifyingly in love with you and I should have said it before today. I should have said it on a Tuesday for no reason, in your kitchen, without cardamom rolls on my floor and my sister’s grief between us.
But I’m saying it now because it’s true and I’m done waiting for clean air. ”