"Everything okay?"
Nia's phone was face-down on the table now. Xavier's hand was still on the takeout bag. For a moment nobody moved. Then Solomon's eyes went from Xavier's face to the sticky note to Nia's hands, and he understood enough to know he had walked into something that would not be finished politely.
"We're fine," Nia said.
Xavier laughed once, without humor. "Are we."
Solomon did not leave. He had co-founded Threshold with them three years ago, and he had never been a man who mistook a slammed laptop for fine. He set his messenger bag on the nearest desk and stayed where he was, as if his presence alone might keep the room from becoming a courtroom.
Outside, a barge horn sounded on the river. Inside, the sticky note glowed under the warm overhead lights like a small, yellow accusation.
II.
They did not fight in front of Solomon. That was the first small mercy of the night, and also the first small cowardice. Xavier picked up the takeout and walked to the kitchenette without looking at either of them. Nia put the phone in her sweater pocket. Solomon, after a beat, said he would lock up the front and go, unless they needed him. Neither of them answered in a way that meant stay.
When the outer door clicked, the loft felt larger and meaner.
Xavier set two containers on the counter and did not open them. He turned. Nia stood with her arms folded, the sticky note still stuck to the laptop like a confession she had forgotten to remove.
"How long," he said.
"Xavier—"
"How long have you been having 'client meetings' with a man who smiles at you like that after hours, with a note on the lid so I won't walk in."
Her jaw tightened. "It is not what you think."
"Then tell me what it is."
She looked at the windows instead of at him. The city had gone fully dark now; their reflections stood in the glass, two people who looked, from a distance, like a couple finishing a long day.
"I can't," she said. "Not tonight. Not like this."
He felt the old heat rise — not rage exactly, but the sharp, humiliating clarity of recognizing a pattern you swore you would never live inside. His father had said not tonight, too. His father had said you're imagining things. His father had said work, until work turned out to have a name and an apartment in Jersey City.