Chapter 12
When Chloe got home at 9:30, she stopped in the doorway.
Her eyes went from the counter to the coffee to the cake to the two mugs already set out.
“You didn’t go,” she said.
“I made better plans.”
She didn’t answer.
She set down her bag, walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup, cut a piece of cake slightly bigger than mine, and sat at the small table.
I sat across from her.
“Dana told you,” she said.
“She texted me.”
“Of course she did.”
“She loves you.”
“She’s a menace.”
“Both things can be true.”
That finally got a laugh out of her.
The real one.
The unguarded one.
The one Marcus had used as evidence against me.
“This coffee is really good,” she said.
“I know.”
She looked down at her mug, still smiling like she was trying to stop and couldn’t quite manage it.
When Felix texted her later that night, she left him on read.
I know because I wasn’t looking.
But the screen lit up on the coffee table, and some things you see without trying.
And some things mean exactly what they look like they mean.
That honesty carried me all the way into the next week.
Wednesday started out normal.
I was on deadline for a piece about a lighthouse in Maine with a history of inexplicable equipment failures. Chloe had a presentation that afternoon.
We had coffee together that morning, which had quietly become a thing.
She left at 8:15 and said she’d probably be home late.
“Good luck with the presentation,” I said.
“I don’t need luck. I’m prepared.”
“I know. Good luck anyway.”
She almost smiled.
Normal Wednesday.
What made it not normal was the leak.
At two in the afternoon, water started dripping through the bathroom ceiling.
Not dramatically. No burst pipe, no flooding. Just a steady drip from a crack above the shower that meant the upstairs unit had a problem that was slowly becoming my problem.
I put a bucket under it and called building maintenance.
Maintenance said they’d come by the end of the day.
The end of the day came.
Maintenance did not.
By six o’clock, one drip had become two. By seven, I had replaced the bucket with a mixing bowl because the crack had spread.
I called maintenance again. Straight to voicemail.
I was in the middle of photographing the damage for a complaint email when the front door opened and Chloe came in, still dressed for her presentation, looking like someone who had spent the entire day being impressive in public and had nothing left for the trip home.
“How’d it go?” I called from the bathroom.
“They approved everything,” she said, dropping her bag. “How’s the—why is there a mixing bowl in the bathroom?”
“Ceiling leak. Maintenance didn’t come.”
She appeared in the doorway, looked at the spreading crack, then looked at me.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not since noon.”
She turned around and went into the kitchen.
Twenty-five minutes later, she came back carrying two bowls of something that landed somewhere between fried rice and congee—practical, improvised, exactly what you’d want after a bad day.
We ate on the couch. The drip from the bathroom sounded distant.
“Eleven weeks ago, I would have screamed about that leak,” she said.
“You screamed at the water heater.”
“That was different. I was caught off guard.”
She took another bite.
“I would have called the manager seventeen times and then cried from frustration.”
“And now?”
“And now I’m eating bad rice and it’s fine.”
“The rice isn’t bad. It’s just built from whatever was in the fridge.”
She looked at me with that expression I had learned to recognize.
The one where she was deciding whether to say the easy thing or the real thing.
She chose the real thing.
“You make things feel manageable.”