Page 64 of The Faceoff

I think, not for the first time and not by choice, about how the people who are supposed to know you are the ones who learn you least, because they stop having to try, and how the ones who learn your coffee order in a week are the ones who — and then I stop, because that thought has a name at the end of it and I’m not going to say the name, even here, even on the floor.

Margo finds me.

I don’t hear the back door, or her on the stairs, or whatever route she takes — I just become aware that she’s standing at the end of the hall in her running things, earbuds around her neck, face still flushed from the cold, and that she has gone completely still in the way she goes still when she’s reading something she doesn’t like.

“Sloane.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re on the floor.”

“I’m resting. The floor is restful. It’s very supportive.”

She doesn’t laugh, which is how I know my face is doing something my voice isn’t. She crosses the hall and folds down next to me, knee to knee, her back against the door, and she doesn’t touch me — Margo knows better than to touch me when I’m like this, knows it the way she knows everything about me, by having paid attention — she just sits, close, sharing the wall.

“Evan,” she says. Not a question.

“Evan.”

“He came here.”

“He brought a flat white.” And it comes out of me with a wet edge I didn’t sanction, the laugh and the not-laugh at the same time, the thing I can’t get all the way under control. “Eight months, Margo. He brought me a flat white. I don’t drink flat whites.”

And Margo doesn’t tell me it’s okay, or that he’s a worm, or any of the things a different friend would reach for. She just says, quiet, looking at the opposite wall: “No. You don’t.”

We sit there for a while. The hall’s cold. Somewhere upstairs, June’s alarm goes off and gets silenced. The ordinary Sunday keeps happening around the edges of us.

“He said people are laughing,” I say. “About Beau and me.”

“People are bored, and they’ll talk about anything. That’s not the same as it being true.” Margo turns her head. “Did you believe him?”

“For about four seconds.”

“And then?”

“And then I remembered that the last reliable narrator in my life was a guy who just brought me the wrong coffee to my own door to tell me who I am.” I tip my head back against the wood. “He’s running it like a schedule, Margo. The texts, then showing up. It’s exactly what Beau said he’d do. He texts, he shows up, he gives it a week. Like Beau had a printout.”

“Because Beau’s seen it before. Guys like Evan aren’t original.” Margo nudges my knee with hers, once. “How are you actually?”

I think about it. The honest answer and the performed answer, and the gap between them that I’ve spent twenty years maintaining, and the fact that the one person who’s earned the honest one is sitting against the door with cold cheeks waiting for it.

“My hands were shaking,” I say. “After. They’re better now.”

It’s not the whole truth. But it’s a true thing, said in a complete sentence, to a person’s face, which is the most I know how to do, and Margo receives it like the gift it costs me to give, which is to say she doesn’t make it a thing. She just nods.

“You’re seeing Beau tonight,” she says. “The rules.”

“At six. After the shop closes.”

“Good.” She stands, and offers me a hand up, which I take. “Because here’s what I want you to think about while you write your little list. You just faced that down alone. Again. And you won, again, the way you always win, by being smarter and colder than the guy who came to wreck you. And then you sat on the floor and shook by yourself, because that’s the part you’ve decided doesn’t get to exist.” She holds my eyes. “The whole point of the Beau thing — the actual point, under the Yale cover and the Bella stuff — is that Evan doesn’t get to show up at this door anymore and find you here alone. That’s the rule that matters. Put it on the list.”

I shower. I get dressed for a Sunday — the soft grey sweater, the dark jeans, the boots that are a half size too big — and when I pull the sleeve down over my forearm it’s pure reflex, covering a bruise that’s already gone, hiding a thing that isn’t there to hide, which is the most honest summary of me I can think of and which I choose not to dwell on.

I make a fresh coffee. Black. Mine.

And I take out the list.

I’ve had it since Tuesday. The actual list, on actual paper, because I don’t trust the kind of thinking I do on a screen — a numbered set of terms for an arrangement I sealed in a parking lot two nights ago and have not yet allowed myself to fully believe in. Rules of engagement. Boundaries. What this is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. No sleeping together. No being kind when no one’s watching. Built-in exit, no renegotiation. The architecture of a thing kept safely transactional, every clause a small wall against the catastrophe of mistaking a performance for a feeling.