Chapter Seven
676 Words
Holly's POV
Two weeks in and I knew I was in trouble.
Not bad trouble. Not danger. Just the specific kind of trouble that comes from wanting something you know is complicated, and not being able to stop wanting it anyway.
I sat across from my sister Diane at her kitchen table on a Thursday evening, she watched Liam one night a week so I could take a breath and I told her about Marcel the way you tell someone about something you've been carrying alone for too long. It came out in a rush: the wrong number, the first night, the two weeks of texting, the slow way it had become the thing I looked forward to most in my day.
Diane listened with her mug held in both hands, her expression cycling through surprise and then careful attention and then something I didn't fully like.
"You've never seen him," she said, when I finished.
"No."
"You don't know his last name."
"No."
"Or what he does."
"He works a lot. He mentions events. Monaco came up once."
"Holly." She set her mug down. "Monaco."
"I know."
"He could be anything. He could be a sixty year old man."
"He's not sixty." I knew that the way you know things without being able to explain it. The voice note he'd sent once, laughing at himself, was not the voice of a sixty year old man. And there was an energy to his texts, a specific kind of self possessed weariness that read as early to mid thirties.
"You don't know that for sure."
"I know."
Diane looked at me for a long moment with the face she'd been making at me since we were children, the one that meant she thought I was being foolish and loved me enough to say so. "What are you doing with this, Holly? Genuinely. Where is it going?"
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"He lives somewhere you don't know. He has a life you know almost nothing about. And you're a single mom with rent due Friday and a four year old who needs stability, and you're getting attached to a stranger."
Every word was accurate. That was the thing about Diane. She didn't exaggerate to score points; she just laid the facts out flat and let them be heavy.
"I know," I said again.
"So what are you going to do?"
I looked down at my coffee. "I don't know that either."
She reached across and covered my hand with hers, briefly. "Just be careful. Okay? Whatever it is. Just be careful."
I drove home that night thinking about careful. I'd been careful for four years. I'd been careful and responsible and I had built something steady and functional and real, and it didn't leave a lot of room for things that might not work out.
But when I pulled up to my building and sat in the car for a minute before going up, I checked my phone and there was a message from Marcel that had come in an hour earlier.
Rough day. Tell me something good.
I sat in my car in the dark and typed: Liam told me today that I was his best person. Not best friend. Best person.
Marcel's reply: That's the best thing I've heard all week.
He's right, you know. I can tell from here.
I sat with my phone pressed lightly against my chest in the dark of my car and thought about Diane saying be careful and thought about all the ways this could go sideways and thought about a man somewhere who'd called me someone's best person like it was obvious and factual, like he'd just looked at the evidence and reported his findings.
I went upstairs. I got Liam from the neighbor who'd sat with him the last hour. I bathed him and read him two stories and tucked him in with both socks this time.
Then I lay in my own bed and typed to Marcel until midnight and felt, guiltily, helplessly, like myself.
- Writer
