31. Vera
Thursday nights are the hardest.
They used to be ours sometimes — her place, my place, wherever the week landed us.
Takeout, bad television, the kind of conversation that goes nowhere and means everything.
If we ended up at mine, Sloane would show up with wine she’d already opened in the car, giving me a look that said don’t look at me like that, it was a long week, and we’d sit on my couch until midnight talking about nothing and I’d go to bed feeling less alone in my own life.
Now Thursday nights are just Thursday nights, and I’ve stopped checking my phone for her name, which is progress.
Kane and Sloane have morning coffee again. He told me, the way he tells me anything about her, carefully, watching my face, ready to absorb whatever it brings up. I told him I was glad. I meant it.
He sees her. She’s trying, with him. She hasn’t called me.
I understand why. But understanding doesn’t make it easier.
I go back to work. Show up, do the job, approve copy, manage clients, run the pitches that need running.
Kane comes home most evenings to find me on his couch with my laptop actually open, actually working, and he sets down takeout bags and says nothing, just presses a kiss to the top of my head and goes to get plates. Like it’s normal. Like we’re normal.
We’re getting there. Most days that’s enough.
The text arrives on a Thursday morning, six weeks after the fight.
I’m in the middle of approving copy for a client’s campaign when my phone lights up on my desk. I glance at it automatically.
Sloane.
I stop mid-approval, hand going still over the keyboard, and stare at her name on the screen for five full seconds before I let myself pick it up.
Sloane: Are you free Sunday? Coffee. The place near my apartment. Eleven AM.
That’s it. No preamble, no explanation, no I’m ready or I’ve been thinking or Kane suggested, just the question, direct and spare.
I read it three times.
My hands shake. I set the phone face-down on my desk, press both palms flat against the surface, and breathe.
After six weeks of silence, she’s the one who reached out.
I pick the phone back up.
Me: I’ll be there.
Three dots appear immediately.
Sloane: Okay.
Just okay. But she asked.
I set the phone down and stare at my computer screen. The copy approval is still waiting. The Henderson proposal is still open in another tab. All of it exactly where I left it, and I can’t look at any of it.
I call Kane. He answers on the second ring. “Hey. Everything okay?”
“She texted me.”
Silence. Then, quietly: “When?”
“Just now. She asked to have Sunday coffee. At the place near her apartment.”
I hear him exhale, slow and careful, the sound of a man setting something down he’s been carrying for weeks. “It’s a good sign, Vera.”
“I know. But I’m terrified.”
“I know you are.”
“What if she wants to — what if she’s decided she can’t—“
“She reached out.” His voice is steady. “She didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“So she wants to try.”
“Yeah.” I take a breath.
“You’re going to be fine.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” A pause, and I can hear him moving, the familiar sounds of his penthouse in the background — a drawer, the quiet of his kitchen.
“Come over after work and we’ll talk through it.
But Vera?” He waits until I make a small sound of acknowledgment.
“She texted you. Let that be enough for today.”
I close my eyes. “Okay.”
After we hang up I sit with the phone in my hands.
She texted me. After six weeks of not-checking and telling myself I wasn’t checking, she texted me.
It’s not forgiveness yet. It’s not Thursday wine nights and oat milk lattes and the easy closeness of a friendship that doesn’t need to work at itself. But it’s Sunday coffee.
It’s a start.
I change clothes three times Saturday night.
Kane watches from the doorway of our — our, still new enough to notice — bedroom, arms folded, expression carefully neutral.
“The blue one,” he says finally.
“What if it’s too—“
“It’s coffee with your best friend. Not a job interview.” He crosses the room and turns me by the shoulders to face the mirror. “Look. You look like yourself.”
I look at my reflection. Jeans. The soft blue sweater he likes. Hair down.
“I look terrified.”
“You look honest.” He meets my eyes in the mirror. “That’s what she needs from you. Not perfect. Just honest.”
I lean back against him slightly and he wraps his arms around me from behind, and we stand there for a moment looking at the same reflection.
The thing I can’t say out loud, even to him: I’m not afraid of saying the wrong thing.
I’m afraid of her face when she looks at me.
The specific look from the elevator — not rage, not screaming, just Sloane with mascara on her cheeks saying I don’t know who you are right now.
I’ve been carrying that look for six weeks and tomorrow I have to walk into a room and find out whether it’s still there.
“What if I say the wrong thing?”
“Then you say the wrong thing and you apologize and you keep going.” His chin rests against my temple. “You’re not going in there to perform. You’re going in there to show up. Those are different things.”
“You’re wise for an architect.”
“Don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
I almost smile.
Sunday, ten fifty-eight AM
The coffee shop is three blocks from Sloane’s apartment. I’ve walked this stretch a hundred times — wine nights, emergency phone calls, Sundays with no particular destination. I know every crack in the pavement.
Today it feels like streets I’ve never been on before.
I push open the door. The bell chimes, too cheerful for what this is.
The café is half-full. Sunday morning ordinary, couples sharing pastries, someone with a laptop in the corner. Everything indifferent to my heart hammering in my throat.
I scan the room and find her.
Sloane at a corner table, two cups already in front of her. Jeans and a sweater, hair down, minimal makeup. She looks tired. Guarded. Her eyes find mine across the room, and for a moment neither of us moves.
I make my feet carry me to her.
I reach the table and stand there, not sure if sitting is something I’m allowed to do yet.
“Hi,” I manage.
“Sit,” she says, not unkind. Not warm either, neutral, careful, a tone I recognize from the early days of our friendship before she decided to trust me. That recognition lands, precise and painful.
I sit.
She pushes one of the cups toward me. Lavender latte, oat milk, extra hot, light foam, my order, the one she’s gotten me a thousand times. I wrap both hands around the cup.
Still warm, the steam carrying the faint sweetness of lavender, and for a moment I’m somewhere else entirely, Kane at my door that Friday night, a cup in each hand, the same order.
Sloane and Kane, in all the ways they are different, both know this one small thing about me.
Both of them. The same cup.
“Thank you.”
She doesn’t respond. Just wraps her hands around her own cup and stares at it like it holds answers neither of us has yet.
The silence between us is heavy enough that I can’t find where to start. Every word I’ve rehearsed in the last six weeks feels too small for the room.
Sloane breaks it.
“Kane told me everything.” Her voice is steady but tight. “I’m not here to go through all that again.”
Relief and terror mix. “Okay.”
“I’m here because you’re my best friend. Or you were.” She looks at me then, really looks at me. “And I need to understand the one thing Kane couldn’t tell me.”
“What’s that?”
“How.” Her voice cracks on it. “How you could lie to my face. For six weeks. Every time I asked. Every time I was right there and you said nothing.”
“I don’t have a good answer,” I say.
“Try.”
I take a breath. “At the beginning I told myself it wasn’t a lie. It was an arrangement — Kane and I had agreed on that word. Something contained, something that might not go anywhere. I didn’t want to worry you over something that might resolve itself in two weeks.”
“But it didn’t resolve itself.”
“No.”
“So why didn’t you tell me then?”
I look at my hands. “Because by the time I knew it was real, I was already in it. And every day I didn’t tell you made the next day harder.” I look up. “I hated every moment of it. I need you to know that.”
She’s quiet. Not softening. Just listening.
“I’m not asking you to forgive the lying,” I say. “I’m just telling you it wasn’t easy. It was the worst part of all of it.”
She absorbs that. Then: “I don’t understand how it even happened. You and Kane have driven each other crazy for years. You fight every time you’re in the same room.”
“I know.”
“So how does that turn into this?”
I wrap my hands tighter around the cup. “Honestly? I didn’t know it was attraction.
Not consciously. I thought he annoyed me.
But every argument had this energy — this intensity.
I’d go home after dinners where we’d disagreed and I’d be wound up for hours.
Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop replaying what he said.
” Something close to a laugh escapes me.
“I told myself it was because he was infuriating. I didn’t realize getting under my skin was the problem. ”
“When did you realize?”
“When I met him at Eclipse,” I say.
“Eclipse?” She frowns. “What’s that?”
I set my cup down. Look at my hands for a moment, then back up at her.
“It’s a private club.” A breath. “A BDSM club.”
Silence.
Sloane stares at me. Her hands tighten around her cup.
“A BDSM club,” she says slowly.
“Yes.”
She looks down at her cup. Doesn’t say anything. I let her have it.
“You’re into that,” she says finally. Not a question.
“Yes.”
She sits back. Takes a breath.
“How long have you known?”
“The desires? Years.” My throat tightens. “But I only started actually exploring them around the time this started. That’s when I found Eclipse.”
“Years.” She says it quietly, turning it over. Her eyes come back to mine. “Vera. You’ve been carrying that for years and you never told me.”