Chapter Six — The Question She Kept Asking
It became the thing she circled back to, over weeks, in different words, like a woman checking a lock she couldn't quite convince herself was fastened.
"So why are you helping your friend cheat on his wife before the wedding?" she asked him in August, half-joking, over milkshakes at the diner, three months into whatever this had become. "That's some best-man behavior, Zaire. Keeping his secrets, running interference."
He laughed it off, the way he always did, easy and quick, a reflex honed over months of practice. "Ty doesn't need my help doing anything. He does plenty on his own."
"You know what I mean. That night at the club. You two were thick as thieves. Y'all had a system."
"We've been friends since we were nine," Zaire said. "We've always had a system."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got tonight."
She let it go — again — because the milkshake was good and his hand was warm around hers under the table and because some part of her, the part that had learned to survive by choosing her battles, decided this one wasn't worth losing him over.
But she noticed things. She noticed he never brought his phone out when they were together, kept it face-down, silenced, and once, when it buzzed insistently for almost a full minute, he didn't even glance at it.
She noticed he paid for everything in cash, small bills, deliberately unremarkable, like a man practiced at leaving no trail.
She noticed that whenever she asked to meet him somewhere near where he lived, he redirected — always her neighborhood, always somewhere anonymous, always somewhere he could disappear from easily.
She noticed. She just didn't let herself add it up, because addition, she'd learn, is a decision as much as it's a math problem, and she wasn't ready yet for the sum.
"You ever gonna let me see where you live?" she asked him in September, teasing, lying tangled with him on her own bed on a Sunday afternoon, sun coming through her cheap blinds in stripes across his chest.
"It's not much to see," he said. "Boring. Corporate housing kind of place."
"A billionaire's assistant living in corporate housing," she said, laughing. "Sure, Zaire."
"I never said billionaire."
"You didn't have to. That watch you don't think I noticed cost more than my car."
He went quiet at that, and something passed over his face that she filed away without examining — not quite guilt, not quite fear, something in between, the look of a man standing on a bridge that's about to be too far gone to turn back from.
"I like this," he said instead of answering. "Just this. You and me and nobody else's opinion in the room."
"Me too," she admitted, because it was true, and because some part of her had already decided that whatever he wasn't telling her, she'd rather have the ninety percent of him he was giving than risk losing it by demanding the last ten.
It was the best decision and the worst decision she'd ever make, and she wouldn't know which for months.