My phone vibrated on the white tablecloth. Happy second anniversary, baby. His message read 8:47 p.m.
I’m stuck at work. Miss you. I looked up from the screen.
Alex was two tables away. His hand was on the back of another woman’s neck. The Upper East Side restaurant kept moving around me, waiters carrying plates, conversations overlapping, candles burning in the particular warm light that expensive places use to make everything look like it belongs in a photograph.
None of it touched me. I was sitting very still inside a moment that had just reorganized everything I thought I knew about my life. The woman was young and dark-haired and visibly pregnant.
Alex was leaning close to her, saying something with a smile I recognized, the same smile that had convinced me two years earlier that I was the person he had been waiting to find. I picked up my wine glass. I was aware of the weight of it in my hand, the cool smoothness of the stem, the particular satisfaction of imagining the arc it would take through the air.
Two years of Sunday mornings making pancakes. Two years of texts asking if he had eaten yet. Two years of waiting up later than I should have because I genuinely wanted to hear the door.
Happy second anniversary, baby. “You don’t want to do that.”
The voice came from the man seated beside me at the adjacent table, quiet and direct, low enough that only I could hear it. He was in his mid-thirties, with the contained posture of someone who had been watching this room for longer than I had been in it.
“Why not?” I said, not looking away from Alex. “Because what’s about to happen is worse than anything you could do with a glass.”
I turned. The man was looking at me steadily.
He had dark eyes with something behind them that I recognized, not anger exactly, but the particular flatness of someone who had been carrying a specific knowledge for a long time. “Who are you?” I asked. “Nicholas,” he said.
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