Chapter 76
Chapter 76
Mira’s POV
Zara was pretending to watch television.
I could tell because she’d been on the same episode for forty minutes without laughing once, which for Zara watching a comedy was medically impossible under normal circumstances.
Her phone was face down beside her. She kept tucking her feet under herself and untucking them. She’d checked the door twice without acknowledging she’d done it.
“He’s not coming,” I said without looking up from my book.
“Who,” she replied immediately.
“The ghost you’ve been watching the door for.”
“I’m watching the television, Mira.”
“You paused it eleven minutes ago and haven’t unpaused it.”
“Maybe I’m thinking,” she said.
“About Marlo?” I smirked.
Silence filled the room.
“I’m not talking about this with you,” she announced, unpausing the television with pointed energy.
I turned a page. “Okay.”
“He’s just—” She stopped. “I said I’m not talking about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“I didn’t bring anything up, you brought it up, I was watching television.”
“The paused television,” I replied pleasantly.
She threw a cushion at me.
I caught it without looking up, which I was unreasonably proud of.
Zara lasted four more minutes before her phone buzzed on the cushion and she grabbed it with a speed that she immediately tried to make look casual, but failed completely, and then abandoned the pretense entirely when whatever she read made something soft and involuntary cross her face.
“He’s coming over,” Zara said, aiming for neutral and landing somewhere closer to pleased.
“Shocking,” I replied.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have a very specific face, Mira, and you’re doing it right now.” She pointed at me. “Don’t make this weird.”
“Zara.” I finally put my book down. “I think it’s genuinely wonderful. He looks at you like you’re the most interesting thing in any room he walks into and you laugh differently around him. The real laugh.” I paused. “I’m not making it weird. I’m happy for you.”
She stared at me.
Then she picked up her phone and looked at it then put it down again.
“He’s different,” she said quietly, losing the performance for a moment. “Like actually different. Not—” She gestured vaguely. “He listens. Properly. Not waiting for his turn to talk, actually listening.” She paused. “It’s unsettling honestly.”
“The bar,” I said flatly.
“I know.” She made a face. “I know, don’t say it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were thinking it loudly.”
Marlo arrived with food this time, proper food from the Thai place two streets over that we’d mentioned once in passing three weeks ago and he’d apparently filed away because that was the kind of thing Marlo did quietly without announcing it.
Zara let him in and immediately went to the kitchen for plates, which left me and Marlo in the living room for approximately forty seconds alone.
He looked at me. “You good?”
“Getting there,” I said honestly. “You?”
Something moved through his expression briefly. “Yeah. Getting there too.”
It wasn’t what he said. It was the specific weight he said it with, like the words were carrying something heavier underneath them that he was keeping carefully packed down.
I filed that away.
We ate on the couch, the three of us, and the conversation moved the way it did when people were comfortable with each other, jumping between things without needing bridges, landing on nonsense and staying there for a while before moving on.
Zara was at full volume, which meant she was happy, and Marlo watched her the way he always did, like she was doing something impressive just by existing in a room.
It was somewhere around the second hour, when the food was finished and Zara had gone to make tea, leaving us with the comfortable quiet of the television low in the background, that Marlo said it.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
Just set it down between us like something that had been getting too heavy to carry and he’d needed to put somewhere.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
I looked at him.
His jaw was tight. He was looking at the television but not seeing it, turning his empty bottle slowly in his hands.
“About Alejandro,” he continued. “And you. About before.”
Something cool moved through my stomach.
“Marlo—”
“There was a—” He stopped. Looked at me properly. Something in his expression that looked uncomfortably close to guilt. “When you first started working for him. There was—”
“Tea!” Zara announced, reappearing from the kitchen with three mugs and the energy of someone who had absolutely no idea she’d just interrupted something.
Marlo closed his mouth and the moment collapsed.
He took his mug, looking at the television and whatever had been sitting on the edge of his tongue got swallowed back down.
I sat there with the cool feeling still moving through my stomach and looked at the side of his face and thought about the specific way he’d started that sentence.
There was a—
A what, Marlo?
Zara settled between us, leaning slightly into his side in that unconscious way she’d started doing, and he shifted automatically to accommodate her, and the whole thing looked so natural and easy that I almost convinced myself I’d imagined the weight of what he’d almost said.
Almost.
“You okay?” Zara asked me, reading my face the way she always did.
“Fine,” I replied.
She looked at me for a half second longer than necessary.
I looked back steadily.
She let it go.
But later, much later, Marlo left and Zara was in the bathroom while I was lying on the couch in the dark staring at the ceiling—
There was a—
The sentence sat in my chest unfinished.
And something in me already knew that whenever it did get finished, nothing after it was going to feel the same.