Page 63 of The Faceoff

And this is the move. This is the one that’s hard, because it’s not a threat and it’s not a plea, it’s a claim — I know who you are — and the claim is designed to make me doubt the ground under my own feet.

“You don’t,” I say.

“Sloane—”

“You don’t know who I am. You knew a version of me that was convenient for you, and you’ve confused the convenience for knowledge, which is a thing people do when they’ve never once had to actually pay attention.” My voice is dropping. I can feel it dropping, the way it does, the precision arriving as the volume leaves. “You brought me a flat white. I have never ordered a flat white in my life. That’s who you know.”

Something flickers across his face. He didn’t expect the coffee to be a weapon. They never expect the small things.

“That’s not fair,” he says.

“It’s completely fair. It’s just not flattering, which you’ve confused for the same thing.”

He sets the tray down on the porch rail. This is new. He’s freeing his hands, which is a thing I notice with the part of me that has always noticed things like that, the part that learned a long time ago in a different kitchen to track where the hands are.

“I made a mistake,” he says. “Okay? Is that what you need to hear? Vivienne was a mistake. It didn’t mean anything, it was the summer, you wanted space, and I — fine. Fine. I screwed up. But you don’t get to just — you don’t get to throw away two years and run to the first guy who⁠—”

“Eight months.”

“—who, what, opened a door for you at a party? Is that it? He did the big strong hockey thing and now you’re —” The reasonable is fully gone now. It went somewhere in the last three sentences and what’s left is the thing that was always under it, the thing I spent eight months telling myself I was imagining. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Sloane. People are talking. You know that? People are laughing. The theater girl and the captain, like that’s a real thing, like he’s not going to get bored of you in a week when he realizes you’re —”

“Stop.”

I don’t say it loud. I say it the other way, the quiet way, the way that’s a closed door instead of a raised hand, and he stops, because even Evan knows the difference between the volumes I have.

“You came to my house,” I say, “on a Sunday morning, with a coffee I don’t drink, to tell me that I don’t know myself and that other people are laughing at me and that I’m embarrassing myself by — what? By being somewhere you weren’t invited? By talking to people who aren’t you?” I keep my eyes on his, because the one thing I have always been able to do, the one skill the whole disaster of my childhood handed me, is say the true thing in a complete sentence to a person’s face. “You’re not here because you’re worried about me. You’re here because the math changed and you don’t like the new math. That’s all this is. You’re not grieving me. You’re losing a thing you’d stopped paying attention to and just noticed was leaving.”

He takes a step closer.

It’s not a big step. It’s the kind of step a person could explain away, could call nothing, could frame as just shifting their weight on a cold porch — and my body goes to the old place anyway, the bright still alertness, the cataloguing of distances and exits that I have never once been able to turn off, and the bruise on my arm that has finally faded to almost nothing aches in a way that is purely memory.

“You’re going to regret this,” he says, low.

And there it is. The whole of him, finally, in four words, no coffee, no wounded face, no I know who you are. Just the part that was always going to be the point.

“Maybe,” I say. “But not for the reasons you think.”

And I close the door.

I close it gently, which is its own small triumph, because the thing my hands want to do is slam it, and slamming it would be giving him a sound, a reaction, a piece of evidence that he got to me, and I will not give him that. I close it the way you close a book you’ve finished. I turn the deadbolt. I stand in the hall with my back to the door and I listen to him stand on the other side of it for a long moment — I can feel him there, the weight of a person deciding whether to knock again — and then the porch boards creak, and the car door, and the engine, and he’s gone.

I stand in the hall.

My hands are shaking.

This is the part nobody gets to see. I slide down the door until I’m sitting on the hallway floor with my knees up and my back against the wood, and I put my forehead on my knees, and I breathe.

I’m not going to cry.

I breathe.

It almost works.

What undoes it — what nearly gets me, sitting on my own floor at ten in the morning — is not Evan. It’s the flat white. It’s the genuinely insane smallness of it, that after everything, after the door and the you’re going to regret this and the step, the thing my throat closes around is a paper cup of a drink I don’t order, left on my porch rail by a person who had eight months and never once asked.

It’s such a small thing to mind.

I mind it so much.