I felt an immediate guilt at the unkind observation. Faiz was my best friend and he’d done more than his share, talking Talia down from walling me out. She and I made eye contact as the boys bantered, their voices prickling like the hackles of a Doberman, short and stark, animosity panting between the niceness, and Talia’s expression congealed with dislike.
I stroked a hand over my arm and tried to keep a smile on. A muscle in Talia’s jaw went rigid as she cracked her face into a similar configuration: her smile tense, mineral, bracketed with impatience.
“I didn’t think you were actually going to come. Not after everything you had to say about the two of us.” Courtesy velveted her voice. Talia peeled from Faiz and strode across the room, closing the distance between us two inches too much. I could smell her: roses and sweet cardamom.
“You two weren’t happy,” I said, hands burrowed into my pockets, a slight backward lean to the axis of my spine. “I’m glad that you figured out your differences but at the time, you were at each other’s throats—”
Talia had almost three inches on me and levered that to her advantage, looming. “Your insistence that we break up didn’t help.”
“I didn’t insist anything.” I heard my voice constrict, the registers narrow so much, every syllable caught and was crushed together into a slurry. “I just thought—”
“You nearly cost me everything,” Talia said, still staccato in her rage.
“I had both your best interests at heart.”
“Are you sure?” Her expression shaded with pity. I glanced at the boys. “Or were you hoping to get Faiz back?”
We had dated—if you could call it that. Eight weeks, no chemistry, not even a kiss, and had we been older, our confidence less flimsy, less dependent on the perceived temperature of our reputations, we’d have known to end it sooner. Something came out of that, at least: a friendship. Guilt-bruised, gestated in the shambles of a stillborn romance. But a friendship nonetheless.
The light deepened in the house, blued where it broke into the corridors.
“I’m fucking sure of it. And Jesus, I don’t want your man,” I told her with as much detachment as I could scrounge, not wanting to sell Faiz short. Not after all this. “It’s been years since we were together and I don’t know what more you want from me. I’ve apologized. I’ve tried to make it up to you.”
Talia let a corner of her lips wither. “You could have stayed home.”
“Yeah, well.”
The sentence emptied into a surprised flutter of noises as the two guys—men, barely, and by definition rather than practice, their egos still too molten—came tumbling back from the periphery. Phillip had Faiz laughingly mounted on a shoulder, a half fireman carry with the latter’s elbow stabbed into the divot of Phillip’s collarbone. Faiz, he at first looked like he might have been grinning through the debacle, but the way his skin pulled upward from his teeth: that said different. It was a grimace, bared teeth restrained by a membrane of decorum.
“Put my husband down!” Talia fluted, reaching for her groom-to-be.
“I can handle it.” A snarling comeback without an anchor, in fact. Phillip could have kept Faiz suspended forever, but he relented as Talia curved a shoulder against him, arms raised like a supplicant. He set Faiz down and took a languid step back, thumbs hooked through his belt buckles, his grin still easy-as-you-please.
“Jackass,” said Faiz, dusting the indignity from himself.
“So tell me about this place, Phillip,” said Talia, voice billowing in volume, filling the room, the house and its dark. “Tell me this isn’t secretly Matsue Castle. Because I’ll kill myself if it is. I heard they buried a dancing girl in the walls and the castle shakes if anyone even thinks about dancing near it.”
The manor seemed to breathe in, drinking her promise. I could tell we all noticed it, all at once, but instead of hightailing it, we bent our heads like this was a baptism.
“The house might hold you to that,” I blurted before I could stop myself, and the sheer wrongness of the statement, the weird puppyish earnestness in its jump from my throat, made me cringe. A long year spent making acquaintances with the demons inside you, each new day a fresh covenant. It does things to you. More specifically, it undoes things inside you. To have to barter for the bravery to go outside, pick up the phone, spend ten minutes assured in the upward trajectory of your recovery: that the appointments are enough, that you can be enough, that one day, this will be enough to make things okay again. All those things change you.