Chapter 118: What Riley carried home

Riley finished the pitch deck at half past two.

She had stayed longer than she intended, the way she always did when she came in on weekends, the building’s particular Saturday quiet creating a kind of focus that the weekday noise never quite allowed. She saved the file, closed the laptop, put on her coat, and stood at her desk for a moment looking at the empty chair across the floor where Martin had been sitting that morning.

She had told herself, for the four hours since he had left, that it was not her business. She had told herself this with some conviction and moderate success, the way she told herself most things she did not entirely believe, filling the space between the thought and the doubt with the pitch deck and two more coffees and a brief exchange with the lobby guard on the way back from the bathroom. She had done a reasonable job of it for four hours.

She picked up her coat and her bag and her phone and walked to the elevator and stood in it watching the floors descend and thought about what Martin had said, stripped of all its executive composure, in the voice of a man who had apparently been saving it up for longer than anyone knew.

I am in love with her.

The elevator opened onto the lobby. Riley walked through it and out into the rain, which had softened from its morning intensity into something more persistent and patient, the kind of rain that intended to stay all day without making a fuss about it. She stood on the pavement outside the Obsidian Spire with her bag over her shoulder and her phone in her hand and looked at Fiona’s name in her contacts.

She thought about what she had told herself. Some things needed to arrive in their own time.

She thought about Fiona’s phone face down on the counter that morning, which Riley knew about because Fiona had called her two hours after the news broke, not to talk about Martin specifically but just to talk, the way they sometimes did when one of them needed the sound of a familiar voice without having a particular agenda for it. She had heard something in Fiona’s voice during that call that she had filed away without commenting on, a particular quality of careful that was different from Fiona’s usual careful, tighter, more deliberate, the sound of someone managing a feeling they had not yet decided what to do with.

She thought about Caleb Reed, who was a genuinely good man by every measure Riley had been able to assess, and about the ring on Fiona’s finger, and about the baby, and about the fact that whatever she did with this information it was going to land in the middle of a life that was already carrying more than most lives were asked to carry at once.

She stood on the pavement for another full minute.

Then she hailed a cab.

She did not call ahead. She had learned, in years of friendship with Fiona, that calling ahead gave Fiona time to prepare her composure, and what Riley needed to see right now was Fiona before the composure arrived.

Fiona opened the door in the soft loose clothes she had been wearing when Caleb came that morning, the ones she changed into when the day required nothing of her appearance, and her face did the thing it always did when she was genuinely surprised by something, completely open for one unguarded second before anything else arrived.

"Riley," she said. "I didn’t know you were coming."

"I know," Riley said. "Can I come in?"

Fiona stepped back and let her through, the apartment warm and smelling of the lemongrass soup that had apparently survived the morning intact, a low lamp on in the living room, the rain doing its patient thing against the windows. Elara was not there, Riley noticed. Just Fiona, alone in her Saturday afternoon, which was either good timing or bad timing depending on what happened next.

"Do you want tea?" Fiona asked, already moving toward the kitchen with the automatic hospitality of someone who needed something to do with her hands.

"No," Riley said. "Sit down, Fi."

Something in her voice landed, because Fiona stopped moving and turned and looked at her properly, the way you looked at someone when you understood that what was coming required your full attention. She sat on the couch. Riley sat across from her in the armchair and put her bag on the floor and folded her hands and looked at her friend.

"I was at the office this morning," Riley said. "Working on the Ashfield pitch. And I found someone in the creative department."

Fiona’s expression did not change immediately. "Found someone."

"Martin," Riley said. "He was sitting at your old desk."

The silence that followed was not long. Perhaps three seconds. But Riley had known Fiona long enough to read three seconds of her silence the way other people read paragraphs, and what she read in this one was not the blankness of surprise but the particular stillness of someone receiving information that connects to something they have been quietly holding for a long time.

"He was in the building?" Fiona said. Her voice came out careful, the composure arriving fast, almost fast enough.

"He’d been there a while, I think," Riley said. "He looked like he hadn’t slept. His shirt was open. He’d been sitting there alone and I don’t know for how long before I found him." She paused. "We talked."

"Riley." Fiona’s voice carried a note of warning now, gentle but present. "You don’t have to tell me this."

"I know I don’t have to," Riley said. "I’m telling you because I think you need to hear it and because I think I would want someone to tell me." She held Fiona’s eyes steadily. "He talked about you. He said he knew why you left. He said it was his fault, that he made a choice that made staying impossible for you and he let you go because he thought he had no alternative."

Fiona said nothing. Her hands were very still in her lap.

"He said he was in love with you," Riley continued, quietly and without embellishment, because the words did not need embellishment, they were already everything they needed to be. "Not past tense. Present. He said he hired you because he recognised you and then spent months keeping his distance because he had already committed to someone else. He said he tried to believe the way things turned out was the right outcome." She stopped. "He said he tried very hard to believe it."

The room was quiet for a moment. The rain against the windows. The faint sound of the cove somewhere beneath it.

Fiona uncrossed her legs and crossed them again and looked at a point somewhere past Riley’s shoulder, the particular unfocused gaze of someone who was not looking at the room but at something happening inside themselves. When she spoke her voice was lighter than it should have been, the deliberate lightness of someone reaching for a tone they needed rather than one that was coming naturally.

"He was in shock," Fiona said. "He had just walked out of his own wedding. People say things they don’t mean when they are in shock, they reach for whatever feels true in the moment and it doesn’t always stay true when the moment passes. He was sitting alone in an empty office and you were kind enough to sit with him and he talked. That happens."

"Fi," Riley said.

"I’m engaged," Fiona said. Still light. Still careful. "I’m having a baby. I have a whole life that I have built deliberately and with full awareness of what I was choosing. Whatever Martin said this morning in an empty office on the worst day of his adult life is not something I need to—"

"Fiona." Riley’s voice was gentle but did not move. "I’m not asking you to do anything with it. I’m not telling you to call him or to change anything about your life or to reconsider anything. I’m telling you because you are my friend and I watched you for months at Voss and I knew there was something there that you never talked about and I think you deserve to know that it was not entirely in your head." She paused. "That’s all. Just that. You are allowed to know that."

Fiona looked at her.

The lightness was still there in her expression, or the attempt at it, but underneath it something had shifted, the way things shifted when a feeling you had been managing carefully stopped being manageable for just a moment, just long enough to show its actual size. Her jaw was set. Her hands in her lap had gone still again in a way that was not relaxed stillness but the stillness of someone holding themselves together deliberately.

"Okay," she said. The word came out smaller than her usual voice. "Okay."

They sat for a while after that without talking about Martin again. Riley asked about the soup and Fiona told her about the recipe, her mother’s version and the adjustments she had been attempting, and they talked about the Monday pitch deck and about a mutual friend who had recently moved cities and about nothing important at all, the comfortable shapeless conversation of two people who had enough history between them to let a heavy thing settle in the room without needing to keep picking it up and examining it.

When Riley stood to go, Fiona walked her to the door and hugged her, a real one, the kind that lasted a moment longer than the social requirement.

"Thank you," Fiona said quietly, into Riley’s shoulder. "For telling me."

"You would have done the same," Riley said.

She would have. They both knew it.

Riley took the stairs down rather than the elevator, the way she sometimes did when she needed the physical movement of descent to think, and walked out into the rain and pulled her coat tighter and started toward the bus stop.

Behind her in the apartment, she knew without being able to see it, Fiona was standing at the closed door in her loose Saturday clothes with the ring on her finger and the baby moving inside her and the words sitting in the room she had just re-entered alone.

I am in love with her.

Not past tense.

Present.

Riley pulled her coat tighter and walked into the rain and told herself she had done the right thing, and believed it about seventy percent, which was, she had learned, about as much certainty as most right things ever gave you.