"My ex wants to talk privately," she said. "You don't need to worry." She was right. I didn't worry. I packed.
When she came back from her private talk, I was gone. She called asking what happened. I said, "We don't need to talk, and you don't need to worry." The pasta water was just coming to a boil when I heard her phone buzz for the third time in 10 minutes. A familiar dissonant chime that had started to feel like a guest overstaying its welcome.
I gave the sauce a stir, arrabiata, her favorite, and pushed the feeling down. Trust isn't a sometimes thing. It's an always thing. That's what I'd always believed. I was fixing the loose hinge on her laptop earlier that afternoon.
That was me in a nutshell. I fix things. I build things. I showed up. For 2 years, I'd shown up for Sarah.
I'd held her hair back when she was sick, celebrated her promotions with cheap champagne, and memorized the way she liked her coffee. Two sugars, a splash of oat milk, no need to ask anymore. We were talking about getting a dog, for God's sake. I was all in. She was curled on the sofa, thumb flying across her screen, a tiny frown of concentration on her face.
It was the same frown she got when reading a complicated article or trying to beat my score in a stupid mobile game. But this felt different. The energy was all wrong. "Everything okay?" I asked, wiping my hands on a towel.
She looked up, her eyes taking a second to focus on me, as if she'd been in another room entirely. "Mhm. Oh, yeah. It's just Mark." The name landed in the cozy room like a shard of ice.
Mark, the ex, the one from before me, the one with the flashy job and the reputation for being emotionally unavailable, which of course she'd seen as a challenge. The one who had drifted in and out of her DMs for months. A ghost I'd been told not to worry about. "Mark?" I repeated, my voice neutral.
"What's up with him?" She let out a sigh, a performance of weariness. "He's just a mess. His mom is in the hospital, apparently. He's really torn up about it.
Says he has no one else to talk to." A warning bell, faint but persistent, began to ring in the back of my mind. "That's tough." I said carefully. "But he has friends.
Family, right?" "You know Mark." She said with a wave of her hand, as if that explained everything. "He builds walls. He's not good at asking for help.
He just called. He asked if he could pick me up just for an hour to talk. Privately." The word hung in the air between us. "Privately?"
It wasn't just a word. It was a door. And she was deliberately closing it in my face. I felt my stomach tighten. "He wants to pick you up and go where?
Why can't he talk on the phone?" Her face hardened instantly. The concern for Mark melted away, replaced by impatience with me. "Oh, don't give me that look, Alex. It's not like that.