HIS EX WORE CHANEL — NOW SHE WEARS HIS REGRET

I'd lit three candles by the time I got home.

One for the first year. One for the fifth. One because my hands needed something to do, and the matches were already out, and grief has its own logic that doesn't answer to reason.

Mama's photo watched me from the shelf — the one from her birthday, two years before the diagnosis, when she still laughed with her whole face. I'd framed it in the cheap silver frame from the drugstore on 63rd because the expensive one I'd ordered online arrived cracked, and I never got around to replacing it, and now it felt right somehow. The imperfect frame. The perfect face.

"I got you something," I told her.

I set the tie against the base of the frame. Navy silk, catching the candlelight. She would've hated that I spent forty dollars on it. She would've said, *Sienna Marie, that man is dead, not royalty.* And then she would've touched it, just once, the way she touched things she found beautiful and couldn't afford to keep.

I was still kneeling on the floor when the knock came.

The candle flame lurched sideways like something had startled it. I watched it settle, then stood, already reaching for the door. Garcia from next door sometimes brought tamales on hard days — I didn't know how she always knew, but she did, and I wasn't in a position to question it.

I didn't check the peephole.

That was my first mistake.

Paige Hartley stood in my hallway with her arm looped through Derek's and a smile so wide it had to hurt. She looked exactly like she always had — expensive, effortless, the kind of beautiful that came with a support team. Her hair was down. She was wearing cream.

"Sienna!" Her voice jumped up half an octave. It always did when she was nervous, and the fact that I still knew that — still catalogued it automatically, like breathing — made me tired in a way I couldn't name. "Oh my God, it's been *forever*. You haven't changed a bit!"

The jasmine hit me before she finished the sentence. Amber underneath, warm and clinging. The same perfume. Five years and she was still wearing the same perfume, and my stomach turned over hard and fast like I'd missed a step in the dark.

My hand tightened on the door. Not pulling it wider. Just holding it at exactly thirty centimeters, which was the distance between *I live here* and *you don't come in*.

"I'm not letting you in," I said. "What do you want?"

Paige's smile didn't waver. That was the thing about Paige — the smile was load-bearing. It held everything else up. "We were in the neighborhood. I brought you something." She held up a gift bag, tissue paper frothing out the top. "Just some things. Skincare, mostly."

I took the bag because refusing it would've required more energy than accepting it. I looked inside. La Mer. The kind my cleaning lady used to use, back when I had a cleaning lady, back when things were different. I set it on the floor beside my foot.

"Derek." I looked at him for the first time since opening the door. He was watching me the way he'd watched me on the sidewalk — that careful, stripped-down attention. He hadn't smiled. "You drove her here."

"She asked," he said. Simple. Like that explained anything.

Paige drifted past me into the apartment before I'd consciously decided to let her, the way she'd always moved through spaces — like permission was a formality that applied to other people. I turned to track her and caught the exact moment she saw the shelf.

Mama's photo. The candles. The tie.

Something moved across her face that she didn't quite manage to control. She crossed to the bookshelf and picked up the photo album sitting open on the bottom shelf — I'd been looking through it this morning, which I shouldn't have been, but October ninth has its own gravity — and a photograph slipped out and fell face-up on the floor.

Three kids. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Me with my hair in two braids, Marcus in the middle with his arm around both of us, Paige on the end squinting into the sun. The summer before everything went wrong. Before the baseball bat, the parking lot, the boys from the other block who'd thought Marcus was easy to push around. Before the juvenile detention facility and the six months that changed the shape of him permanently.

Before he came home different, and stayed different, until he didn't come home at all.

Paige looked at the photograph for a long moment. When she looked up, her eyes were shining. Perfectly timed. Perfectly calibrated.

"Today would've been your anniversary, right?"

I picked up the photograph. I didn't look at it again. I folded it once, twice, and dropped it in the trash can by the desk.

Behind me, one of the candles made a sharp, cracking sound — the wick popping, wax shifting — and we all went still for half a second, like something had been said that none of us knew how to answer.

"If you need anything," Paige said, her voice gentled now into something that sounded almost like the girl in the photograph, "money, help, whatever — just tell us. We're old friends, right?" Her hand came up and then pulled back, the gesture of reaching without arriving. "You don't have to do all of this alone."

I looked at her. I let myself really look, past the cream dress and the jasmine and the performance of concern, at the slight tension around her eyes that meant she was waiting for something. Measuring.

I smiled. I felt it stop on my face after exactly two seconds, like a clock running down.

"Sure," I said. "Why not."

We took Derek's car to dinner. I sat in the back. Paige sat in the front and filled the silence with the kind of conversation that's really just sound — a restaurant she'd been to, someone's engagement, a renovation. I watched the city move past the window and thought about nothing, which is a skill I'd spent years developing.

We stopped at a red light on Michigan.

I saw Paige reach into her bag in my peripheral vision. Lip gloss — the wand catching the red light as she uncapped it. She leaned slightly toward Derek, her voice dropping into something private that she made sure wasn't private.

"Last time you kissed me so hard I bled."

The light was still red. Nobody moved.

"I walked in on you two before," I said. My voice came out flat and even, like I was reading something off a page. "This is nothing."

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence. Derek's hands were on the wheel. Paige recapped the lip gloss. The light changed to green and the car moved forward and nobody said a word.

Then my phone lit up on the seat beside me.

HUBBY.

The ringtone filled the car — three full seconds before I registered what I was hearing. I looked down at the screen. The name sat there, bright and simple and devastating in ways I couldn't fully account for.

In the front mirror, I caught Paige's eyes drop to my phone.

HUBBY.

The phone rang again.