Chapter 10:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

Lark came out of the mansion behind him, calling his name with increasing urgency. Soren got into his car and drove away. She stood in the gravel in her good dress and watched the taillights go, which I will admit was not nothing.

Theron and I drove in separate cars, which I hadn’t thought to address until I was already pulling out of the gate and realizing I had no idea where we were going or whether there was a plan. I followed his headlights for twenty minutes until he turned into the parking lot of a late-night tea house on the edge of the commercial district — not fancy, not a statement, just open at eleven on a weeknight with good lighting inside.

We took a table by the window. A server appeared. Theron ordered tea and something with red bean paste without consulting the menu.

“I should explain about Soren,” I said. “What he said about me following him around, the years of it — it’s true, or it was. I want you to understand what you’re getting into.”

“I know what I’m getting into.”

“You know the fact of it. I’d like you to know the rest.”

He looked at me steadily. “All right.”

So I told him — not everything, not the past life, but the outline: the years of hoping, the adjustments I’d made to myself to fit a shape that moved further away the closer I got, the bakery I’d half-apologized for, the way I’d learned to read his moods and spend myself against them. I kept it factual. I didn’t want sympathy and I didn’t perform composure either; I just told him the true shape of it as plainly as I could.

He listened without filling the silences.

Ro𝗆𝗮ո𝘤𝗲 no𝘷𝖾𝘭ѕ 𝘰𝘯 𝗀a𝘭𝘯𝘰v𝗲l𝗌.𝘤о𝘮

The tea arrived. He pushed the red bean pastry toward my side of the table.

“I used to like him,” I finished. “I genuinely did. That part isn’t complicated. The complicated part is that I kept liking him well past the point where the evidence suggested I should stop.”

“People do that,” Theron said.

“Intelligent people do it for years,” I said. “Which is either a comfort or not, depending.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Not the performed warmth of a man trying to put someone at ease — something drier, involuntary. I looked at him. He picked up his tea.

We stayed until the tea house closed.

The days that followed were nothing like I expected and also precisely what I should have expected, which I say because I’d spent two years with a man who calibrated every kindness for effect and had completely forgotten that some people simply aren’t doing that. Theron showed up. He did what he said he would. When I mentioned the cold in my apartment he didn’t offer advice; he sent someone to fix the heating, and when I objected on principle he looked genuinely puzzled.

“It was cold,” he said.

“I know, but—”

“Now it won’t be.” He moved on.

My she-wolf, who had spent two years in a low-grade defensive crouch, started to unknot herself. I noticed it first in small ways: sleeping through the night, eating properly, finding things funny that I would have been too tired to find funny six months ago.

Then one afternoon I opened Instagram to check the bakery account and saw that Soren had changed his profile photo to a picture of me. Not a recent one — something from two years back, from a party neither of us had particularly wanted to attend. All his recent posts referenced me. The pinned highlight at the top of his profile read: Fable is my only love.

I stared at it for long enough that Theron looked up from his book.

“What?”

“Soren updated his Instagram.”

A pause. “Does it require a response?”

“No.” I put the phone down. “No, it doesn’t.”

In the life before this one, I had waited years for him to say something like that in public. Posted evidence, a declaration, anything that would confirm I wasn’t inventing the whole thing. He never had. Now that I no longer needed it he’d apparently found it very easy.

I picked up my sketchbook and went back to the wedding cake design.

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