Maya was still asleep on the couch, one arm thrown over her eyes. The morning had the texture of something ordinary, which was the strangest part. There was nothing in this kitchen that asked anything of him. No tension waiting in the walls, no emotional weather to read before he knew how to act. Diane set a mug in front of him without asking how he took it and then went back to the eggs.
"How old is Marcus?" she asked. "Seven." he said. "He's with my mother." "Does he look like you?" "Around the eyes."
He wrapped his hands around the mug. "People say so." She smiled at the stove and he watched it happen, not a performance of warmth, but the real thing, small and private like it was just for herself. He was still sitting there turning the mug slowly when his phone buzzed on the table. The name on the screen was Tasha.
He knew the rhythm of her calls. A weekend morning meant she'd had a bad night or a good one and either way she wanted an audience. He had answered those calls for 7 months since the breakup, not because he wanted to, but because not answering felt like a decision and he had never quite been ready to make it. It was easier to pick up, easier to let her voice fill the space where something harder used to be. He looked at the screen.
He looked at the kitchen at Diane's steady hands moving a spatula through the pan at the rain-wet window at the chair he was sitting in as if he'd sat in it a hundred times before. He turned the phone face down on the table. It buzzed once more then went quiet. Diane set a plate in front of him, eggs, toast, sliced tomato and sat across from him with her own. She didn't ask about the phone.
He didn't explain it. They ate. He drove home an hour later with the windows down despite the cold because he needed the air to think. Not about Diane exactly, more about the thing that had happened at that table the moment he turned the phone over and felt instead of guilt something closer to clarity. Ethan had spent 4 years with a woman who needed him most precisely when he had the least to give.
Tasha had a way of making chaos feel like intimacy, of making him feel essential in the way a person feels essential when they're the only thing standing between someone else and a crisis. He had confused that for love for a long time. Maybe he had confused it for identity. Seven months out, he still hadn't blocked her number, and he had told himself it was because he didn't want to be petty. But sitting in his truck on the way back to his real life, his shop, his son, his mother's Sunday cooking, he understood it more plainly.