In Love With My Ex's Cousin

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Elena

Wednesday belonged to Sofia before it belonged to anyone else.

I spent the morning on the Hawthorne file and the Riverside quote follow-up, then left the office at six without opening another folder. I walked. The air was cold enough that I put my hands in my coat pockets and kept them there.

Sofia had chosen a place three streets from my apartment: small tables, too much noise, food that arrived without a speech about the chef.

She was already seated, honey-blonde hair down for once, a glass of wine in front of her and a second one waiting across the table.

“You’re on time,” she said. “I’m suspicious.”

“Don’t be. I was hungry.”

I sat, shrugged off my coat, and drank. The wine was better than the week had been. Sofia watched me over the rim of her glass with the expression she used when she had already decided to be kind and honest in the same hour.

“How is the river place?”

“Treatments are ordered. He approved both layers. Installation next week if the headings arrive.”

“That’s the work version.”

“It’s the only version I have.”

Sofia tore a piece of bread and didn’t look convinced. “I’m not asking you if you’re in love with him. I’m asking if the job is sitting in your week the way other jobs sit.”

“It is.” I took more bread. “I have Hawthorne. I have a junior designer who keeps specifying stone that stains. I have lunch with my mother on Sunday if I can get there. Riverside is fabric and access and invoices.”

“All right.” She sat back. “Then we can talk about my client, who wants the campaign to feel ‘disruptive but safe,’ which is not a brief. It’s a personality disorder.”

I laughed. It came easily. For the next hour that was the evening: her work, a waiter who forgot the water, a pasta I actually finished, Sofia doing an impression of Marcus that was unkind and accurate. I told her about the tomatoes rolling across my kitchen floor on Saturday. She told me she had worn the wrong shoes to a pitch and limped through the whole thing pretending it was confidence.

This was the part of my life I refused to shrink. Not for a surname. Not for an empty apartment over the river.

“Sunday,” Sofia said later, when the plates had been cleared. “Your mother.”

“She wants me to see a piece before it goes on the wall.”

“Are you going?”

“I’ll try. The week has a habit of running past me.”

Sofia pointed her fork at me even though the fork now had nothing on it. “Go. Isabella notices when you disappear into work and call it independence.”

“I know.”

“Good.” She signed for the bill before I could argue and waved off my protest. “You can buy next time, when you remember that food exists at dinner time.”

We walked the first block together. At the corner she hugged me, quick and tight.

“Text me if the installer turns into a problem.”

“I will.”

“Text me even if it doesn’t.”

“I will.”

I walked the rest of the way home alone. The building stairs smelled like detergent. My apartment was dark until I turned on the kitchen light and put the leftover bread on the counter. I changed, washed my face, and checked my emails like I always did.

Marcus had sent a note about a new residential enquiry for next month. The heading supplier had confirmed a date. Luca had not written. There was no reason he should have. The quote was already approved.

I replied to the supplier, flagged Marcus’s email for the morning, and left the rest.

Isabella had sent a photograph of the piece: a small canvas, dark blue, a line of gold leaf through the centre that caught even in a phone picture. Under it she had written, Sunday. Come hungry.

I typed back.

I’ll come. Don’t cook too much.

Her reply was immediate.

I will cook too much. That’s the point.

I set the phone down and stood at the window with a glass of water. The street below was ordinary. A man walking a dog. A cab door slamming. Someone laughing too loudly on the opposite pavement. My life was still this: a kitchen, a friend who ordered wine before I arrived, a mother who used food as a way of keeping me in the room.

Tomorrow I would be back at the office. Friday I would chase the installer. Next week the Riverside windows would stop being bare.

I went to bed without opening the project folder.

In the morning I would. That was enough structure for a Wednesday night. The rest of the week could arrive in order: work, Sunday lunch, fabric on a river window.

I slept. When I woke, the first thing I thought about was coffee, and then the junior designer’s stone sample, and only after that the fact that I had a site to coordinate.

That order felt correct.

I made the coffee black, drank it at the counter, and left for work on time.