"You can," Xavier said. "You just won't."
Nia crossed to him. Up close he could smell the peppermint oil she put on her wrists when she had a headache. She had had a lot of headaches lately. He had brought her tea. He had rubbed her neck. He had believed the headaches.
"X," she said, softer. "Please. Give me twenty-four hours. I will tell you everything. I swear. But if I start now, while you're already deciding who he is, I will say it wrong and you will never hear me."
"I am not deciding. I am looking at evidence."
"You are looking at a sticky note and a smile and calling it a crime scene."
He flinched. She saw it. She did not take the words back.
They stood like that until the Thai food went cold. Then Xavier put his jacket back on, left the containers on the counter, and went home to the apartment they shared on Dekalb, where Mr. Vasquez the landlord was watering the lobby plants and said, "Long day, Mr. Lyles?" and Xavier said, "Yeah," because that was true and incomplete in the same breath.
Nia stayed in the loft until midnight. She peeled the sticky note off the laptop, folded it once, and put it in her wallet. She did not call Bertrand back. She sat on the floor with her back against the brick and cried without sound, the way she had learned to cry in graduate school when the studio was open all night and pride was a better pillow than honesty.
III.
Xavier did not sleep. He lay on their bed with his phone face-up on his chest and watched the ceiling fan turn. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the blue shirt, the smile, the yellow paper.
At two in the morning he got up and made tea he did not drink. He opened the drawer where they kept important papers — lease, insurance, the folder with their engagement photos from last spring at Prospect Park — and found nothing that explained a man on a call. Of course he found nothing. Secrets did not live in shared drawers.
He texted Kwame, his oldest friend from Morehouse, who lived in Harlem and kept terrible hours.
You up?
Kwame replied in under a minute. Always. What's wrong.
Xavier typed and deleted three versions. Finally: I think Nia is lying to me about something big. Caught her on a call with some guy. Sticky note said client meeting. After hours. Alone.
Kwame: Damn. You talk?
Xavier: She asked for 24 hours.
Kwame: Then give her 24. And don't go digging like your father did. That way only makes you both sick.