The Coffee

Saoirse POV

Priya came to the new apartment on a Saturday at eleven.

I had been preparing for it all week. Not the apartment, the apartment was ready, had been ready since Siobhán lined the shelves I had been preparing the version of myself that was going to receive my best friend for the first time since the night I had lied to her by omission about a thing I was, for the foreseeable future, never going to be able to tell her.

I made coffee in the small French press I had bought myself the day after moving in. I set out two mugs. I put a plate of small things on the table  the orange shortbread she liked, the dried apricots she pretended not to like and ate all of and I sat in my chair by the window and I rehearsed, one more time, the shape of the conversation I was about to have.

She buzzed at eleven-oh-three.

I let her in.

──

Priya in my doorway was a thing I had not been prepared for, even with a week of preparation.

She looked at me. Her eyes did the small inventory eyes do when a person who loves you has not seen you in two weeks during which something they cannot name has changed about you. She did not comment on the wrap on my wrist. She had seen it last week. She did not comment on the apartment, though her eyes registered it, and registered the trees through the window, and registered I watched this happen the small fact that there was no second mug on the drying rack.

She crossed the threshold.

She put her arms around me.

She held me for a long time, the way Priya holds people who are not telling her something, which is to say: without asking, without pressing, without making the hug itself a question I would have to answer.

I held her back.

I did not cry. I had decided, in the week of preparation, that I was not going to cry. Priya already carried enough.

──

We sat. We drank coffee. She ate the apricots.

She asked me, gently, about the apartment. About the move. About my mother. I gave her the small ordinary answers a woman gives her oldest friend on a Saturday morning, and I watched, the whole time, the careful operation of the muscles in my own face, calibrating each sentence the way I had once calibrated sentences for Derek.

I want to tell you what that calibration cost me.

Priya was not Derek. Priya was the person I had been least careful with for fifteen years. I had told Priya things across our friendship that I had told no one else. The two of us had a vocabulary of trust we had built over a decade and a half, and the calibration I was running with her that morning the careful sentence-by-sentence engineering of a truth I could not give her was a violation of that vocabulary that I, not Marcus, was committing.

I was the violator, here.

That sat in my chest the whole time she was in my apartment.

──

At some point, near the end of the coffee, Priya said: “God, I’m exhausted. Work has been unhinged. We’ve been running cases through this new AI thing the office bought last year, and the volume’s gone through the roof. I think it’s a good tool. I think it’s also making me crazy.”

I said: “An AI thing?”

“Some predictive tool. Sorts cases by risk tier. We’re supposed to escalate the highest-tier ones through their system instead of through the regular channels. Faster review, in theory.” She rolled her eyes. “In practice, I escalate a case, it disappears into their review queue, and I get a closure note three weeks later. I have no idea what they’re actually doing with them.”

She laughed.

I did not laugh. I made the shape of a laugh with my face. Inside, I made a small private note that the name of the AI thing was something I was going to ask her, very carefully, about another time. Not today. Today was not the day to gather data from my best friend like a homicide detective taking statements.

I said: “Sounds awful.”

She said: “It’s awful in the way good tools are awful. I keep telling myself it’s helping somebody.”

I drank my coffee.

──

She left at twelve forty.

At the door, she stopped, and she looked at me for a long second.

She said: “Saoirse. If you ever if there’s a thing you need to tell me. About any of it. About Derek. About the night. About what comes next. There’s nothing you could say that I would not handle.”

I looked at her.

I said, with the steady voice I had been practicing: “I know.”

She nodded.

She went down the stairs.

I closed the door, and I stood with my forehead against the wood for the length of one breath, and then I straightened up and I picked up my keys and I went out, because I could not stay in that apartment for another minute with the residue of a lie I had just told the one person in my life I had never, before this autumn, lied to.

──

I walked to the small café on Cortelyou Road that I had been visiting on Saturdays.

I ordered a coffee I did not need. I sat at the window.

And about four minutes into the sitting, I felt it.

The specific cold quality at the back of my neck. The arm-hairs. The body-knowing. I did not turn around. I did not scan the room. I sat with my hands wrapped around the second coffee of the morning and I let my body register the fact that I was being looked at not by the man across the table reading on his phone, not by the woman with the dog by the door, but by someone whose attention had the specific shape I had only ever felt once before, in my own living room, at 9:47 on a Tuesday in November.

I did not turn around.

I drank my coffee.

I read, with intentional unhurried attention, the menu I was not going to order from.

When my coffee was done, I stood up. I walked, calmly, out of the café. I did not look at the other tables. I did not scan the street. I got back in the van, which I had parked half a block down, and I drove home to my apartment.

──

On my doormat there was a small object.

Not flowers. Not a card.

A photograph in a small silver frame.

My grandmother on the porch of her house in Donegal, the summer before she died. The photograph I had packed into the duffel the night of, and then — I had not been certain until this moment — had left in the drawer of my old desk in the bedroom at 437 Birchwood because the duffel had been full and I had thought I would come back for it.

I had not come back for it.

He had.

He had been in my apartment again, after I had not gone back, to retrieve the one thing he had noticed I had wanted to take and had failed to.

I picked the frame up.

I held it.

The photograph was undamaged. The frame had been cleaned the small tarnish that had been on it for years was gone. He had cleaned the frame before he gave it back to me.

I let myself in. I closed the door behind me. I locked it twice.

I did not check it a third time.

I put the photograph on the kitchen windowsill, in the morning light, where my grandmother could see the trees.

I sat down at the table.

I understood, with a cold clarity, that the distance had closed.

The man who had been watching me from data was no longer just watching me from data. The man who had been leaving things on stoops was no longer leaving things on stoops. The next time, I understood, I was going to see his face.

I did not know whether I wanted that or feared it.

I noted, with the small honest precision I was learning from this autumn, that both could be true.