O QUE RESTOU DE NÓS

THE ANNIVERSARY — PART 2

That evening, the table was set for two.

There were no flowers, decorations, or any attempt to manufacture an intimacy the house had never known.

Mael had chosen dinner carefully and placed two glasses on the table.

The seat across from him remained empty.

First, the food stopped steaming.

Then a thin film formed over the sauce.

Finally, the candles burned low until Mael leaned forward and blew them out one by one.

Smoke rose from the wicks in thin threads and dissolved above the table.

The gift remained in his hands.

Mael ran his thumb along the edge of the wrapping without realizing it.

At some point, he looked at the clock and almost laughed at himself.

He hadn't arranged anything with Adrian.

He hadn't been promised anything.

It was impossible to accuse someone of missing a date that had never existed.

Even so, it hurt like an absence.

His phone vibrated beside the untouched glass.

A message with no text, only a link to a livestream.

Mael considered ignoring it.

He had already learned that some things reached him with the precise intention of causing pain.

Even so, he touched the screen.

Music and voices invaded the silence of the room.

The camera moved through a crowded ballroom, capturing raised glasses, faces too close to the lens, laughter disappearing beneath the music.

Julian appeared in the center of the frame.

Mael frowned, not understanding why anyone would send him this, until he heard someone wish Julian a happy birthday.

Another person repeated it.

A third raised a glass to Julian.

Birthday.

Mael looked at the date at the top of the screen.

The coincidence took only a moment to form, and when it did, it seemed obscene in its simplicity.

Julian's birthday.

Mael and Adrian's wedding anniversary.

For three years, that date had existed for Mael with only one meaning.

He had never known that, for Adrian, it had carried another name long before it carried his.

Then Adrian entered the frame.

Mael's fingers tightened around the gift.

Adrian didn't look like someone who had shown up out of obligation.

He was comfortable in that space, attentive to Julian in a way Mael recognized immediately because he had spent years observing the absence of that attention whenever it was directed at him.

And in Adrian's hand was the same dark box Mael had seen in the hall.

For a few hours, he had thought it might be his.

Adrian handed the box to Julian.

Julian opened it.

The ring caught the light before the camera moved closer.

There were shouts, laughter, comments racing up the side of the livestream.

Engagement.

Finally.

I knew it.

You're back together.

Mael couldn't read them all.

He didn't need to.