The sheets on his side were cold like he had not been there for hours.
Lily pressed her palm flat against the empty space for a moment, then pulled it back.
Her phone vibrated on the nightstand.
She picked it up.
“At work with Vivian.
She insisted on coming with me.
She made breakfast before she left, she insisted.
Didn’t want to wake you.
Florist is scheduled for the ballroom this morning, please supervise.
— E”
She read it twice and put the phone face-down.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor for a full minute without moving.
Last night, She fell asleep with his arm across her waist after a slow s*x and his breath against her hair and she thought… okay.
We are okay.
‘He woke up before me and let a woman I met twelve hours ago make breakfast in my kitchen.
With my pans, eggs, coffee.
And he ate it and went to work and sent a text.’ Lily bit her lips hard, almost in tears.
She stood up, got dressed and disposed the breakfast Vivian had made.
She picked up her keys and went to the ballroom.
She waited but the florist did not come.
She called the number twice.
Voicemail both times.
She stood in the middle of the empty ballroom at nine fifteen in the morning looking at forty bare tables and thought about calling Ethan, then she thought about the text, and she put her phone in her bag and drove to the wholesale market instead.
Her grandmother had taught her: “if a thing needs doing and nobody is doing it, you do it.” So she did it.
She loaded eucalyptus and white roses and trailing greens into a trolley while the vendor watched her with quiet sympathy, then she came back and she built every arrangement herself, table by table, her hands moving with the muscle memory of a woman who had been making rooms look effortless since she was twenty-two.
By the fifth table she had almost stopped thinking about the cold sheets.
Then the ballroom doors opened.
Vivian walked in wearing Ethan’s charcoal jacket, the Saturday jacket, the one he wore on lazy afternoons and every weekend morning.
It sat on Vivian’s shoulders like it had been placed there deliberately.
Lily’s hands did not stop moving.
Vivian looked around the room, the twelve arrangements Lily had built alone in two hours and her face filled with something that looked very much like sympathy.
“You did all this yourself?” She tilted her head.
“Ethan really should get you more help.”
‘Said warmly like she feels sorry for me.
Said by a woman standing with my husband’s jacket in my ballroom at nine thirty in the morning.’
“I manage.” Lily reached for the next stem.
Vivian sat on the edge of an unsettled table, and looked around like she was admiring a view.
“Can I ask you something?
That grey in your living room.” She smiled.
“Ethan chose that, right?”
Lily looked up and smiled slightly.
“We chose it together.”
“Mm.” Vivian’s smile stayed warm, completely unaware of what it was doing.
“He painted his first apartment that exact colour.
Because of me, actually.
I told him once that grey felt like the calmest colour I knew.
He never forgot.”
The smile on Lily’s face disappeared.
“I didn’t know you two were close,” she said.
“We grew up together.” Vivian’s voice was fond.
The voice of someone reaching back for a sweet memory.
“We dated, actually.
Before I moved to Korea.
First loves.” She exhaled.
“Ancient history.”
“Hmmm…He never mentioned that.” Lily said.
“I’m sure it just never came up.”
‘Three years of marriage and Ethan never told me about his first love?
The woman whose nickname is saved in his phone, the woman he painted a room for… So it was never for me?” Lily thought.
She said nothing.
She kept building the arrangement because the arrangement needed to be built and she was not going to let her hands shake in this room.
Margaret, Ethan’s mom, arrived at half past ten for the annual board walk-through.
She stopped in surprise when she saw Vivian.
“Vivian.” She crossed the room directly to her.
“I didn’t know you were back.”
They did the kind of greeting that old families do, both hands, cheek kiss, genuine warmth on both sides.
“Just arrived last night.
Ethan was kind enough to…”
“Oh come on, Of course he was.” Margaret smiled.
Then she turned and looked at Lily and at the room, the forty tables, the arrangements Lily had built from scratch before nine AM.
“Lily.
I thought the florist was handling this.”
“They cancelled.” Lily kept her voice pleasant.
“I covered it.” She paused and smiled.
“How are you doing, Margaret?”
Margaret’s eyes had already moved back to Vivian.
“Vivian, walk with me.
I want to talk about the board seating.”
They turned and left together, their voices dropping to something private, their footsteps moving in the easy synchrony of two women who had been doing this for years.
Lily watched them go through the ballroom doors and shook her head.
She picked up a stem.
“Of course he was.” That was what she said.
Not oh, how did that happen?
Not… I didn’t realise you were still in touch.
Like she already knew.
Like this was not news at all.
Like Vivian coming back and Ethan driving through the rain and the jacket on the chair and the breakfast this morning were all part of something Margaret had already seen coming.”
She put the shears down and breathed.
She started cleaning up.
The folder was behind the chair near the far wall, it slipped down between the seat cushion and the leg, the kind of thing that falls unnoticed and gets left.
Lily picked it up to set it aside.
The top page slid free as she lifted it.
Foundation accounts.
She could read a spreadsheet in her sleep and her eyes moved down the columns automatically, figures, dates, reference codes, line items.
She got to the third line and stopped.
She looked at it again.
Three entries that had no business connecting.
A movement of funds across them that did not belong to any event she had coordinated, any vendor she had contracted, any invoice she had ever signed.
Forty thousand dollars.
She looked at the ballroo
m doors and looked back at the page.
“What is this?” she said, barely above a breath.
Read!
strike a guess