He sat at the table in the dark. He thought about a woman who had looked at an empty chair and stayed where she was. He thought about what it meant to want something and be terrified of it at exactly the same time. He thought about 4 years of making himself smaller. He sat at that table for a long time.
And somewhere in the quiet of a Friday night that was almost Saturday, Ethan Parker stopped trying to convince himself that nothing had changed because something had. And he was too tired of lying to himself to pretend otherwise. Ethan's hands were still flat on the table. He hadn't moved them, hadn't pulled them back. The glasses had stopped rattling, but the silence hadn't stopped.
It had just changed shape, gone from shocked to something heavier, something that pressed down on all eight people at that table, like a hand on the back of the neck. Daniel Ross had not stepped back. That was the thing Ethan noticed first. Most men, when another man put his hands on a table like that and said, "Say that again." in that particular register, most men recalibrated, took a half step, remembered something they needed to do on the other side of the room.
Daniel just stood there with that smile still on his face. Had probably worked on a lot of people in a lot of rooms and looked at Ethan like he was something mildly interesting he'd found on the bottom of his shoe. Easy, big guy, Daniel said. I'm just asking a question. No, Ethan said.
You weren't. Clare hadn't moved either. She was still on his lap. Not because the buzz was crowded anymore. Not because there wasn't a stool 6 ft away that had been empty for the last 20 minutes.
She was there because she'd chosen to be there. And now every person at that table knew it. And Daniel knew it most of all, and that was the thing that had made him say what he said. Ethan understood this the way you understand something in your body before your brain catches up. Daniel hadn't been talking to Clare when he said it.
He'd been talking to him to the specific soft place in a man like Ethan that Daniel had somehow in three seconds of observation already found and pressed his thumb into a man who's still in love with a dead woman. Marcus had gone very still at the far end of the table. Diane had her hands wrapped around her glass and was looking at the surface of the table with the focused attention of someone who is desperate not to make eye contact with anyone. Jake or Jason had physically turned his chair slightly away, the way people do when they want to create the illusion that they're not witnesses to something. Nobody was leaving.
Nobody was stepping in. This was Ethan's. Daniel spread his hands like he was being reasonable. Look, man, I don't even know you. I'm just saying Clare has a type, and her type tends to be complicated.
And you? He gestured at Ethan in a way that managed to take in everything. the bar stool, the daughter he'd mentioned earlier when the table was still warm and easy. The four years that sat on his face like weather. You're complicated with a capital C. Daniel Cla's voice was quiet.
Quiet the way the air gets quiet right before something changes. I'm being honest, babe. Don't call me that. You used to like it. I used to like a lot of things that weren't good for me.