PART 2:

People were entitled to carry things privately, but he noticed. He also noticed more than he’d expected to that she was funny, not performed funny, not the kind of wit people deploy to be impressive. She had this dry, quiet sense of humor that snuck up on you. She’d say something completely deadpan about a situation, and he’d be two sentences past it before it landed, and then he’d laugh out loud, and she’d look almost pleased.

He did not examine why he’d started paying attention to when she looked pleased. The night it happened was a Thursday. Ethan had come home later than usual. A job in Tribeca had run long, the kind of wiring situation that started as a 2-hour estimate and became 5. He was tired, wearing the particular kind of tire that sits in your shoulders.

and he went to his room to drop his bag and then immediately realized he’d left his phone charger in the kitchen. He went back down the hallway. He passed Victoria’s door. It was open. Not all the way, just a few inches, the way a door drifts when the latch doesn’t catch properly, which was a thing he’d been meaning to fix and hadn’t.

He saw the light on and registered movement, and said without thinking, already walking, “Hey, did you?” And he pushed the door. He saw her in the mirror first. She was standing sideways to the full-length mirror that had come with the apartment, wearing a deep blue dress that he would later be completely unable to describe in any useful detail because his brain had ceased to perform useful functions.

Her hair was down. He’d only ever seen it down in passing in the mornings, and she had one hand raised to her collarbone and was looking at her own reflection with an expression he hadn’t ever seen on her face before. Not confidence, not the boardroom version, anyway. Something stripped of that, something uncertain and a little raw.

She saw him in the mirror and spun around. Oh, God. Her face went red, which he had not seen happen before. Ethan, I’m sorry. He was already backing up. Door was open. I I didn’t mean to. I’m going. I’m going. Wait. He stopped. There was something in her voice that wasn’t just embarrassment. something underneath it.

He looked at her, keeping his eyes on her face carefully, deliberately, and waited. She had one arm wrapped around herself now. Not for modesty exactly, more like she was holding something together. “Does it look wrong?” she asked. The question was so unexpected that he didn’t answer for a second. “What?” “The dress.” She gestured at it vaguely at herself.

My sister’s engagement party is Saturday. My whole family is going to be there and she exhaled. It looked different in the store. I don’t know if it she stopped. Never mind. Forget I said anything. Victoria, seriously, you can It doesn’t look wrong, he said. She looked at him with the particular skepticism of someone who has been told things they later found out weren’t true.

You’re saying that because you walked in on me and you feel bad. I’m saying it because it’s true. He leaned against the door frame carefully, like he was being thoughtful about how much space he was taking. You looked at yourself in that mirror like you were hoping to see someone else. That’s not the dress’s problem.

She didn’t say anything. Her jaw moved slightly, like she was working through whether to say something or not. That was almost a compliment, she said finally. It was a compliment. I’m just bad at framing them. A beat passed. Something in her posture eased. Not much, but enough. My ex is going to be at the party, she said.

It came out flat, and he understood from the flatness alone that this was not a simple thing. Your ex? Marcus? She said the name the way you say the name of something that has cost you. He and my sister’s fianceé are old friends, so he’ll be there. And my mother will be delighted because she still thinks he was another stop. It doesn’t matter what she thinks.

What happened with him? She looked at the mirror instead of him. He was very good at making me feel like the problem. Whatever the problem was, it was always me. My work schedule, my priorities, my personality. Not loudly. He was never loud about it. He just adjusted me a little at a time for 2 years until I didn’t recognize the way I made decisions anymore.

Ethan was quiet. He’d known enough people who’d been through enough things to know when someone was saying something important by the way they went careful with words. I got out, she said 8 months ago. But he’s going to be there Saturday and he’s going to be the charming, easy version of himself that everyone else gets.

And I’m going to have to yet. She stopped again. Her chin came up. I don’t want to walk in there alone. Ethan looked at her for a moment, then. So don’t. She blinked. What? Don’t walk in alone, he said. Take someone. A pause. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t quite name. Are you? She started carefully.

Are you offering? I’m suggesting the obvious solution. The obvious solution is for you to pretend to be my boyfriend at my sister’s engagement party. When she said it out loud, it did sound marginally stranger. One night, he said, “You need someone in your corner. I can do that.” She studied him.

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