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Harper looks up from her glass. “What did you say?”
“I said that was rather the point of books. He said he’d prefer a refund. I said I’d prefer he learned what irony was. We parted ways. He left a Yelp review.” He takes a long sip. “I’ve read it twelve times.”
“Was it scathing?” I ask.
“It called me ‘theatrical but ultimately unhelpful.’” He says this with the quiet dignity of someone receiving a great honour. “I’m putting it on a plaque.”
Across the table, Liv is staring at her phone with the flat expression she uses when she’s found something personally offensive. “I redesigned the loyalty card again,” she says to nobody in particular. “New layout, better hierarchy. It looks great. I hate it. I don’t know what happened.”
“Classic creator’s guilt,” Harper says without looking up.
“I think I was in a mood when I picked the font. It’s giving ‘doctor’s waiting room.’” She turns the phone around to show us. “Look at that kerning.”
“It looks fine,” I tell her.
“It looks fine,” she repeats, like I’ve confirmed a terminal diagnosis. She puts the phone face-down on the armrest. “Anyway.”
Harper sighs at the ceiling. “I’ve been staring at the same plot hole for three days. The hero drives from Perth to Cheynes in four hours, which is physically impossible, and I cannot figure out how to fix it without cutting the whole third act.”
“Make the car faster,” Luca suggests.
“It’s contemporary fiction.”
“Make him faster. He’s emotionally turbulent. Maybe he drives in a turbulent way.”
“That’s not…“ She closes her eyes briefly. “I’ll think about it.”
This is the thing about this table, the way it fills itself in from all four corners, Luca with his theatrics and Liv with her forensic observations and Harper with her dry, precise wit, and me in the middle of it, warm and held. I love them. I love this. I’m still turning over my thoughts about Daniel though.
So, mid-sip, without really planning to, I say it.
“Daniel’s seeing someone.”
The table goes quiet.
The sort of quiet that happens when three people simultaneously decide to wait and hear the rest before responding. Luca sets his glass down with a soft click. Harper tilts her head very slightly. Liv narrows her eyes in the way she does when she’s waiting for the punchline.
I shrug, which I didn’t plan either. “I think the weirdest part is that I mostly just feel relieved. I don’t have to wonder if he wants me back anymore.”
Another beat. Then Luca makes a sound, a sound that seems to be a mix of a laugh and a choked cough.
“Right,” he says, already sitting forward. “Right. Okay. I need to say something.”
“Luca…“
“No, hang on.” He points at me. Not aggressively, just with the energy of someone who’s about to make an extremely important point and wants to ensure it makes the impact it’s intended to. “You’re sitting there looking like you just told us you accidentally ran over someone’s dog and you’re waiting to be told it’s your fault. What is happening in your face right now?”
I open my mouth.
“Because Daniel dating someone is not the tragedy here,” he continues. “The tragedy, Elsie, the actual tragedy, is that you just told us you feel relieved, like that’s a shameful thing to feel, and then immediately braced yourself.”
I close my mouth.
Liv uncrosses one leg and recrosses the other. “You emotionally divorced that man the second you found those messages,” she says, with the flat certainty of someone delivering a fact they’ve known for a while. “The rest was just admin.”
“The paperwork just caught up later,” Harper adds quietly.
That strikes a chord. I feel a weight being lifted that I didn’t realise I was holding. I look at Harper, who is watching me with the warm, unhurried attention she brings to things she means, and feel the truth of it move through me. Not as comfort. More like confirmation of something I already knew but hadn’t let myself say out loud.
