Chapter Nine — The Almost Slip
It happened in October, three weeks before the billboard, at a downtown restaurant Zaire picked specifically, he said, because "nobody from work ever comes here" — a detail Kamiko noted and didn't examine, filed alongside all the others.
They were two glasses of wine into dinner when a man in an expensive suit stopped at their table, hand extended, all teeth. "Zaire Kingston! Didn't expect to see you slumming it over here. Congratulations again, man — Sade's a lucky woman. We still on for the golf thing before the big day?"
Kamiko watched Zaire's whole body go still, a fast, total stillness she'd never seen in him before, gone almost as quick as it came.
"Wrong table, man," Zaire said, smooth, fast, a smile snapping into place like a door closing. "I think you've got me confused with somebody."
The man blinked, looked again, reddened. "God, I'm sorry — you look just like a guy I— my mistake, man, sorry to interrupt your dinner."
He left. Kamiko sat very still, turning her wine glass slowly by the stem, the whole restaurant suddenly too loud and too bright around her, like someone had turned every light in the room up a full notch without asking.
"He knew your name," she said. "Both your names."
"Common name," Zaire said. "Kingston's not that unusual."
"He said Sade. He said the big day."
"Must be thinking of somebody else's wedding," Zaire said, too quick, too smooth, the practiced deflection of a man who'd built an entire relationship out of exactly this kind of sentence. "Half of Atlanta's getting married this fall, feels like."
She let it go. She'd think about that decision more than almost any other, later — the exact moment the whole lie had stood up in front of her, dressed in an expensive suit, and said her boyfriend's real name and his real fiancée's real name to his real face, and she had chosen, out of love or fear or sheer unwillingness to lose the best thing she'd had in years, to look away from it one more time.
"You okay?" Zaire asked, watching her carefully, and there was something almost pleading in it, some silent apology for a lie he wasn't ready to end yet.
"I'm fine," Kamiko said, and picked her fork back up, and told herself, one more time, that soon still meant soon.
It would be three weeks before she understood exactly how wrong she'd been to believe that, and by then the billboard would have already done the telling that Zaire, given a hundred chances that fall, had never once managed to do himself.