The Lies Between Us

The dishwasher hummed its monotonous cycle, and Rowan sat at the kitchen island with her second cup of coffee going cold beside her. Greg had already left for work. Lila was at daycare. The house was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator breathe.

This was her life. This was all of it.

She scrolled through her phone out of habit, thumb moving on autopilot through real estate listings and a grocery list she'd been adding to all week. She almost missed it. The little red notification bubble on the Facebook app, the name inside it stopping her cold.

Cole Harlan.

Her heart kicked so hard she pressed a hand flat to her sternum, like she could calm it down through pressure alone. Twenty years. Twenty years of silence, and now his name sat there on her screen like a lit match dropped on dry paper. She stared at it for a full thirty seconds before she opened it.

The message was short. That was the thing that undid her. If he'd written something long and overwrought, some speech about the past, she might have closed it and walked away. Instead, it was just five words and a question mark.

You remember that night. Truck?

She did. God help her, she did. His old Chevy parked out by the reservoir, the windows fogged, the radio playing something she couldn't name now but could still feel in her chest. She'd been twenty-two and certain she was in love for the last time in her life. She hadn't been wrong about the last time part, just about the love lasting.

She set her phone face-down on the counter and walked to the sink, rinsed her cup, dried her hands. She picked the phone back up and read the message again.

She typed: I remember.

Then deleted it.

She typed: Cole. It's been a long time.

Deleted that too.

She put the phone in her purse and drove to the office.

By eleven o'clock, she had typed and deleted six more responses on her lunch break, hiding her screen from her coworker Diane like she was sixteen and passing notes in class. The office smelled like burnt coffee and carpet cleaner. Outside the window, the parking lot baked in flat afternoon light. There was nothing romantic about any of it, and yet her pulse had not returned to normal in four hours.

She sent: Of course I remember. Why are you asking me about it now?

His reply came back in under two minutes. Because I've been thinking about it. Thinking about you. Wondered if you ever think about it too.

She looked at those words until they blurred. Then she closed her office door and sat back down at her desk and typed back: Sometimes.

That was all it took. That one small, honest word cracked something open, and by the time she drove home that evening, they had traded a dozen messages. He told her he was back in the state, had been for two years. He told her he'd seen her profile by accident, a mutual friend's comment, her face in the thumbnail making him stop scrolling. She told him she was in real estate now. She did not mention Greg. He did not ask.

What he did ask was whether she was happy.

She sat in the driveway for three minutes with the engine running, reading that question, feeling it press against the inside of her ribs like something trying to get out. She finally typed back: I have a good life.

His response was immediate. That's not what I asked.

Dinner that night was pasta and Greg talking about a software migration at work that she couldn't follow, didn't try to follow. She passed the bread, she refilled Lila's water cup twice, she laughed at the right moments. Greg didn't notice she was somewhere else entirely. He never noticed anymore. She wondered when she'd stopped minding that he didn't.

"You're quiet," he said, not looking up from his plate.

"Long day," she said. "Lots of showings."

He nodded like that settled it. Because for Greg, things were always that simple: a surface answer was the same as a real one. She used to love that about him, the uncomplicated steadiness of him. Now it felt like talking to a wall painted to look like a window.

She did the dishes. She bathed Lila, read her two stories, kissed the top of her wild auburn curls and breathed her in — that clean, powdery smell that was the most real thing in her world. She tucked her in and stood in the hallway for a moment with her back against the wall, eyes closed.

What are you doing, Ro?

She went to bed at ten. Greg was already asleep, or pretending to be. She lay on her side facing the window, the streetlight cutting a pale stripe across the ceiling, and she reached under her pillow for her phone.

There were three more messages from Cole. She read them in the dark, her face lit up blue and small in the quiet bedroom. He wrote the way he'd always talked, rough and direct, like he didn't have time to soften anything. He said he missed the sound of her laugh. He said he wanted to hear her voice. He said he'd been a lot of places in twenty years and none of them had made him forget her.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

She thought about Greg's back, three feet away, rising and falling with easy sleep. She thought about the question Cole had asked that she still hadn't answered honestly. She thought about the truck and the reservoir and the girl she used to be before she traded all that fire for something safe.

She typed: I'm not as happy as I should be.

She sent it before she could think twice. Then she tucked the phone back under her pillow with her heart slamming and her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling like she'd just lit the first match and was watching to see what caught.