Chapter Seven: Cherry
1855 Words
Shoreditch, London
January 20, 2025 · 15:30
Eva stood at the entrance of the café, watching Cherry through the glass as she sat by the window.
They hadn’t seen each other for a month. Cherry looked thinner; her hair was cut shorter, though she still wore those exaggerated oversized hoop earrings.
Eva pushed the door open.
The wind chime rang once. Cherry lifted her head, looked at her, and did not smile.
“You came.”
Eva sat down. In front of Cherry was a cup of Americano that had long since gone cold.
Cherry raised a hand to call the waiter. “Hot chocolate,” she said, then turned to Eva. “You need something sweet.”
Eva did not argue.
Outside, Shoreditch looked exactly the same as ever—graffiti-covered walls, boys weaving through traffic on bicycles delivering parcels, freelancers clutching laptops as they hurried off to meet deadlines. A month ago, this had been Eva’s world. Now, sitting here, she felt like a stranger passing through it.
“As for business,” Cherry began first, “the bar’s revenue rose twelve percent last month. The café broke even. You don’t need to worry.”
“I know.”
“You know?” Cherry gave a brief laugh that never reached her eyes. “And how exactly do you know? Your phone’s been off, you don’t answer messages—what exactly do you know?”
Eva said nothing.
The hot chocolate arrived. She wrapped her hands around the cup but didn’t drink.
Cherry studied her, and the hardness in her gaze gradually softened.
“Eva, I didn’t come here to fight with you.”
“I just—” Cherry paused. “I just don’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“How you suddenly fell so deeply into this.”
Eva lifted her eyes.
Cherry slid her phone across the table. The screen glowed with a photograph of a man—around forty, dressed in a suit, smiling with practiced civility.
“A new client,” Cherry said. “Her husband’s a lawyer. Married seven years. She wants him tested—offering double the usual price, and she specifically asked for you.”
Eva glanced at the screen, then pushed the phone back.
“I’m not taking it.”
“Why?”
“No particular reason. I’m just not.”
Cherry stared at her.
Silence rose between them like water slowly filling a room. The sounds of the café suddenly seemed far away—the low hum of the grinder, the hiss of milk frothing, the laughter of two girls chatting in the corner. None of it had anything to do with them.
“You’ve fallen in love with him,” Cherry said.
It wasn’t a question.
Eva didn’t answer.
Cherry let out a laugh. This time it escaped her lips, but it sounded even more painful than silence.
“Eva Nolan,” she said, “what the hell did you teach me? Do you remember?”
Eva remembered.
That night, Cherry had just gotten divorced. She sat drunkenly on Eva’s living room floor, asking how she could ever become like her—how she could stop getting hurt. Eva had poured her a glass of water and said, Love is your greatest weapon. Those men fall in love with you because you never love them back. The moment you truly mean it, you’ve already lost.
“And now look at you,” Cherry continued. “You’ve thrown yourself headfirst into it, leaving me alone to handle everything. Do you honestly think that’s fair?”
Eva took a sip of the hot chocolate. Guilt filled her eyes. She knew she owed Cherry.
Back then, after they had earned a decent sum, it was Cherry—always the practical one—who suggested investing the money into other ventures.
This café was one she had personally arranged to acquire.
Every month, the profits were split evenly, the money transferred into Eva’s account without a cent missing, never a day late.
And there was also the bar in the busiest district—The Velvet Room—which had never once required Eva’s attention. They had never had a single dispute over money.
Eva stared at the melting cream in her cup. The black liquid slowly seeped into the white, turning it a muted gray.
“I know this is my fault,” she said quietly. “But I can’t pull away right now. I love him.”
“You’ve completely lost your mind.” Cherry shot to her feet in anger.
“When have men ever mattered to you?” she snapped. “All they’ve ever loved about you is your body—you were the one who said that.”
“Yes,” Eva replied softly. “Those men before… their eyes were full of nothing but desire. Straight to the point. All they knew was how to take. They could barely wait a day before devouring me. How could I not see through that?”
“And this one?” Cherry shot back. “He’s suddenly pure and spotless? You’d better remember how things ended for me.”
After all, back then Cherry and Simon—her ex-husband—had once loved each other with a passion that seemed ready to burn the world down.
The scene of the first time Cherry introduced Eva to him remained vivid in her memory. It had been four years ago, when Cherry was deeply infatuated with Simon and could hardly wait to present him to her dearest friend.
They had arranged to dine at an upscale restaurant. On the surface, he seemed a perfectly agreeable man—gentle, attentive, pulling out her chair, brushing a crumb from the corner of her lips, studiously ignoring every beautiful woman who passed by.
And yet his gaze lingered, for several seconds too long, upon Eva’s collarbone. Eva noticed the impropriety at once.
Soon after, his hand slipped beneath the table. That evening Eva had dressed as she usually did: a velvet white blouse paired with an ultra-short skirt, elegant yet provocatively tailored. Her long, shapely legs had always drawn men’s eyes, and she had never thought there was anything improper about it. Her beauty required neither concealment nor display.
Soft music drifted through the restaurant, meant to soothe the senses, but Eva felt a sudden wave of nausea. The man, seated beside his girlfriend, had placed his hand upon Eva’s thigh beneath the table, even brushing tentatively against the tip of her foot, as though testing whether she might share the same sordid intentions.
It was their first meeting. Eva did not expose him. Instead, from that day forward, whenever they were to meet again, she made a point of dressing more modestly.
Later, in a moment of reckless passion, Cherry married him.
After the wedding, he treated her with every appearance of tenderness and devotion. To outsiders, they seemed perfectly matched.
Until the day, Cherry’s phone issued an alert: her newly purchased luxury sports car was registering unusual movement inside a private garage.
That day, her husband had taken the car, claiming he needed it to meet a client.
Cherry opened the in-car video feed.
On the screen, the two of them writhed together like a pair of grotesque, entangled creatures. The woman’s cries rang out in exaggerated pleasure, while Simon straddled her, gripping her legs as he drove himself violently into her.
They were so absorbed in their act that they paid no attention to the car’s blaring alarm.
As Simon neared c****x, he was even shouting, “I love you—you’re incredible…”
Cherry’s hand trembled as she tapped the screen and locked the car remotely.
She did not cry. She did not scream. She filed for divorce—and sold the revolting car along with it. She once said that every time she imagined the filthy fluids left upon those seats, she felt the urge to smash the vehicle to pieces. But she restrained herself, because the car had been purchased entirely with her own money. Simon, after all, had been nothing more than a parasitic insect—an insect who fancied himself worthy of driving a luxury car to his sordid rendezvous.
From the day of their divorce onward, Eva carried a heavy burden of guilt. She often thought that if she had told Cherry the truth sooner, perhaps they would never have married, and Cherry might have been spared such humiliation.
Thinking of this now, Eva held her cup weakly in both hands. Cherry seemed to read something in her eyes and said quietly, “I’m a failure at marriage. I don’t want you walking the same road I did.”
“Men look one way on the surface,” she continued, “and who knows what they’re like in the dark. You’re not stupid—you know that.”
Silence followed. The long, heavy kind.
Then Cherry lifted her arm and rolled her sleeve back slightly. On the inside of her wrist lay a faint scar—thin and old. Eva had seen it countless times.
“You think the night I came to drink with you after the divorce, I really wanted to hear you lecture me?” Cherry said. “I wanted you to tell me how not to die.”
Eva stared at the scar.
“But I didn’t die,” Cherry said, lowering her sleeve. “Because you told me dying would be too easy for them.”
“I remember.”
“Then now—you…” Cherry’s throat tightened, and she did not finish.
Eva reached across the table and took her hand.
Cherry’s hand was cold—the chill of a London winter's night gathered in her palm.
“I haven’t forgotten,” Eva said. “But I—”
She stopped.
She hadn’t forgotten. She simply couldn’t do it.
Just as when she was fifteen, and the doctor at the rehabilitation center had told her she must learn to trust people again. She had nodded and said yes—then spent six years allowing no one to come close.
Now someone had come close.
And she hadn’t pushed him away.
Not because she had forgotten the pain.
But because—
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Cherry looked at her for a long time.
Then Cherry turned Eva’s hand-over and held it.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Cherry said. “I just—”
She didn’t finish.
Her phone began to ring. It was Leo.
Can we talk? At the place where we first met.
I don’t see what there is to talk about, Eva replied.
I told you before—you owe me an explanation. Unless you want our next meeting to be as awkward as the last one. We’re friends, aren’t we? We’ll see each other many times.
Eva found her thoughts drifting. She said she would think about it.
She stood and hugged Cherry. “I have to go.”
“When you’ve decided, call me.”
Eva nodded, then disappeared into the endless stream of traffic.
- Writer
