33. Sloane
Two weeks after the café, the anger is quieter. Still there, showing itself at odd moments. While loading the dishwasher, or when lying awake at two in the morning because my brain won’t let me have anything as straightforward as sleep.
What I find underneath it, now that it’s not so loud, stops me cold.
I miss her.
Not abstractly. Specifically. The way you miss a particular thing that has no replacement, the way she’d show up on a bad day without being asked, already knowing, already carrying whatever was needed.
The way she’d sit across from me and listen to a work problem I’d been turning over for a week and say here’s your angle in thirty seconds flat, like she’d been waiting for the question.
The shorthand of nine years — the look, the half-sentence, the obviously that meant we’d arrived at the same place without needing to map the route.
That’s gone now. Or paused. I’m trying to call it paused.
I go to work. I do the job. I have Wednesday coffee with Kane, which is careful and real. A start. He doesn’t mention Vera unless I do. I haven’t.
Friday afternoon I’m in back-to-back client meetings, the kind that require the version of me that has answers and a plan and a calm I don’t feel underneath, and I deliver it because that’s what I do, because Sloane Sinclair does not fall apart in a conference room. The weekend is worse.
Saturday I clean my apartment, already clean. Rearrange the bookshelf and stand at my window for twenty minutes watching the street below without seeing any of it.
Sunday my mother calls and asks careful questions and listens. When I tell her I haven’t reached out since the café she’s quiet for a moment and then says: “Are you waiting until you’re not angry, Sloane, or until you’re sure you’ve punished her enough?”
I don’t answer that.
After we hang up I sit on the couch for a long time.
The throw blanket is folded over the arm where Vera always sits when she comes over. I look at it. I look at my phone.
She said everything I needed her to say at the café. She said it without flinching. I’m not sorry I fell in love with him, which I’m still angry about, but which I also recognized as the most honest thing she could have given me. She didn’t perform the answer I wanted. She gave me the real one.
And she said I would burn the whole thing down before I let that happen to you.
I’ve been carrying that since the café too.
Sidney ended the way it ended because none of us knew how to fight for it. Because we were young and nobody told us that friendship is a choice you have to keep making, especially when it’s hard, especially when it would be easier to let it go.
I know how to fight for it. Vee knows how to fight for it. She showed up to that café table and told me the truth even when the truth was complicated, and she held my hand when I let her, and she said I’ll fight for you for as long as it takes and meant every word.
This is not the same as Sidney.
I’ve known it since about Tuesday. I just wanted to be sure — sure I wasn’t choosing her because I missed her, sure it came from something sturdier than loneliness.
But missing someone this much, this consistently — that’s not weakness. That’s love.
I sit with that for a moment.
The afternoon light is going gold through the windows.
I pick up my phone.
Open our thread. Our whole history unspooling, years of it, the jokes and the emergencies and the photographs and the voice notes and the Thursday nights and the obviously and the love you, weirdo — right there.
I start typing.
Me: Are you free this week? Drinks. Our usual place.
I stare at it. Nine words.
I send it.
Her response comes in under a minute.
Vera: Yes. Whenever you’re ready.
Not finally or thank god or anything that makes this about her relief. Just yes, and whenever you’re ready, and the restraint of someone who has been waiting without pushing.
I read it twice, feeling the tightness in my chest — there since the café — finally ease.
I type back.
Me: Thursday. Seven. Don’t be late.
Vera: I’m never late.
Me: You are always late.
Vera: ...Thursday. Seven. I’ll try.
I laugh. Out loud. Alone in my apartment on a Sunday afternoon, genuinely laughing for the first time in two weeks.