Chapter 3: The Video Call text
The estate did not feel like a performance when I walked through the front door. It felt like a tool I had chosen not to leave idle.
Staff had lit the outdoor heaters along the terrace. My sister arrived first, loud with delight and uninterested in anyone’s seating politics. The colleagues followed, then the babysitter’s family, then a neighbor from my old building who had nowhere else to go and cried when she saw the ocean from the kitchen window. We cooked without a catering catalog. Someone burned the rolls. Someone else produced a pie from a grocery box. Noah’s absence sat at the edge of the evening like an empty chair I refused to decorate with bitterness.
May you like
After dinner I stood on the private path and watched the dark water. Ethan had wanted smaller. Intimate. I had given him the space he asked for. In return I had filled a larger space with people who did not require me to disappear for the arrangement to work.
My phone stayed mostly quiet. One message from Ethan late in the evening: Hope you’re having a peaceful night. I replied: I am. Give Noah a kiss from me. I did not attach a photo of the infinity pool. The reveal, if it came, would not be a trap set on Christmas Day. It would be a decision made when I was ready, not when a guest list had wounded me into spectacle.
