Playing Mr. Playboy

Chapter 3: What Mia Wouldn't Say

Elena's POV

Mia called on a Thursday afternoon, and I knew something was wrong before she even said hello, because Mia never called — she texted, she voice-noted, she sent me nine-second videos of her nephew doing something ridiculous. She hadn't called me in months.

"I saw your husband," she said, breathless, like she'd been building up to it all day and finally lost the nerve to talk herself out of it. "Two days ago. Downtown."

My stomach dropped clean through the floor. Two days ago was Tuesday. Tuesday, Daniel had told me he was stuck at the Hartwell site an hour outside the city, wouldn't be home till late, don't wait up.

"Where downtown?" I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles ached. "What was he doing, was he—"

A crash cut me off — glass shattering somewhere on her end, a muttered curse, her voice pulling away from the phone. "Sorry — sorry, my nephew just knocked over the — hang on, hang on—"

The line dissolved into noise. Footsteps. A child crying somewhere in the background, high and insistent. I stood in my kitchen gripping the phone with both hands, waiting, my heart going so hard I could feel it in my throat.

By the time Mia came back, something in her voice had shifted. Careful. Measured, in a way Mia — loud, blunt, say-it-and-deal-with-the-fallout-later Mia — had never once been with me in fifteen years of friendship.

"It's probably nothing," she said. "I mean — it's probably fine, forget I even brought it up."

"Mia." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "You don't call me out of nowhere to tell me you saw my husband somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, and then tell me to forget it."

A long breath crackled through the line. "Can I say something? And you won't get mad at me for it?"

"You're already worrying me a lot more than the actual sighting did."

"You used to run circles around every room you walked into, El." Her voice had gone soft now, almost gentle, which somehow scared me more than sharpness would have. "You used to have opinions about things that weren't Sophie's nap schedule or what's for dinner. I love Daniel, I do, I'm not saying — I just wonder sometimes if you actually know the man you're married to now, or if you just know the version of him he shows you."

It stung precisely because it wasn't cruel. Mia didn't do cruel. Mia did honest, blunt and unfiltered, and that was always so much harder to shake off than an insult would have been.

"That's a strange thing to say right after telling me you saw my husband somewhere he claimed he wasn't," I said, my voice tight.

"I know. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—" Another pause, quicker this time, more final. "I have to go, the baby's crying and my sister's out, I'll call you this weekend, okay? I love you. Bye."

The call ended before I could ask a single one of the six different questions crowding up my throat all at once.

★★★

I stood there in my kitchen for a long time after, staring at the phone in my hand like it might explain itself if I looked hard enough.

Downtown. Two days ago. Tuesday.

The Hartwell site is an hour outside the city.

I did the math a dozen different ways, trying to find a version where it made sense — traffic, a rescheduled meeting, a client dinner he hadn't mentioned. I couldn't find one. I couldn't find a single innocent shape that fit.

That evening, setting the table while Sophie did her homework at the counter, I brought it up as casually as I could manage, my voice light, my hands steady on the plates even though nothing inside me was steady at all.

"Mia says she saw you downtown on Tuesday."

Daniel didn't even look up from Sophie's math sheet, his red pen moving steadily down a column of subtraction problems. "Haven't seen Mia in months," he said. "You sure she meant me?"

"She said your name."

"People say a lot of things." He circled a wrong answer, tapped it gently for Sophie to notice, unbothered, easy, the same tone he'd use to tell me he was out of his favorite coffee. "Maybe she saw someone who looked like me. Downtown's full of guys in gray suits, El."

It was such a reasonable answer. That was the thing about Daniel — every single explanation he gave me was reasonable. Logical. The kind of thing I would have believed without a second thought a month ago.

But I'd stopped believing things without a second thought.

Was it him, I thought later, alone at the sink, hands moving through soapy water without really feeling it, or was it her — was Mia the one hiding something, and the warning was just her getting ahead of it before I could find out on my own?

Two women had now told me, in their own roundabout ways, to be careful. One was Daniel's sister, who had every reason in the world to protect him. One was my own best friend of fifteen years, who had no reason to lie to me about anything.

I turned the question over and over as I dried the last plate and set it in the rack.

If it wasn't him she saw — then why did she sound so scared to tell me?

And if it was him — then what was Mia doing there to see it?

I didn't know which possibility frightened me more. I only knew that for the second time in a week, someone I trusted had looked me in the eye — or, in Mia's case, spoken to me with her voice carefully arranged — and given me an answer that didn't quite fit the shape of the truth.

I lay in bed that night beside my husband, staring at the ceiling, and for the first time I let myself think the sentence all the way through instead of stopping halfway.

Someone is lying to me. I just don't know which one yet.