Chapter Six
614 Words
Marcel's POV
I made a mistake the following Tuesday. A small one by most standards, but it confirmed something I'd been pretending not to notice.
Petra had sent over the schedule for the charity gala Bouska Group was co hosting the following month. Standard event. I attended four or five of these a year, smiled in photographs, wrote a check, left early. She needed my food preference for the seating arrangement. I opened the email to respond.
Then I opened my texts instead.
If you had to pick one meal, I typed to Holly, for a formal event. What would you choose?
Her reply came fast. Are you asking me to plan your dinner?
I'm asking your preference.
Why?
Because I'm curious about you and I've run out of normal questions.
A pause, then a laughing emoji, she used those sparingly, which meant they landed harder when they appeared. Beef. Something braised, slow cooked, with good sauce. Not fussy. Just deeply good.
Agreed, I typed.
Do you go to a lot of formal events?
I'd walked into that. Some.
For work?
Mostly.
She let that sit for a moment. I could tell she was deciding whether to push. She usually knew when to press and when to leave space, which was a quality I found rare and valuable. You're interesting, she wrote finally. You volunteer just enough to keep me curious and not enough for me to actually understand you.
Is that frustrating?
A little. But so am I, so it seems fair.
She was right. She was careful with the details of her own life in the same way I was with mine. I knew she had a son named Liam, that she worked at a diner, that she was twenty eight, that she was funny and sharp and exhausted in a way that was structural rather than temporary. I didn't know her last name. I didn't know what city she was in. I'd checked the area code once, mildly, before deciding that felt like a line I shouldn't cross unilaterally.
Can I ask you something? I typed.
Depends on what it is.
Liam's father. Is he around?
Another pause. Longer this time. No. He's not.
I'm sorry.
Don't be. It's better this way. She paused, then added: He made his choice a long time ago. We're fine.
I believe you.
But?
No but.
There was a but in your tone, she wrote, and I felt something like amusement mixed with something warmer at the fact that she could read tones through text messages. That she could read mine.
I was just thinking, I typed carefully, that someone who chose to leave you must not have been paying attention.
The silence after that went long enough that I thought I'd overstepped. I set my phone down and went back to the gala email and typed beef, braised into the food preference field. Then my phone buzzed.
Marcel.
Yeah.
That might be the nicest thing anyone's said to me in years.
That's a low bar.
I know, she said. But you cleared it.
I sat at my desk for a moment in the particular quiet of my office after hours, the city visible through the floor to ceiling glass and the gala response sent and Holly's words on my screen, and I thought about Catherine and about walls and about the specific mathematics of letting someone in. About what it cost and what it might cost and whether the calculation was one I was prepared to do again.
I didn't have the answer that night.
But I was, I realized, starting to want one.
- Writer
