My Boyfriend Drugged Me to Fake My Affairs

The texts came without warning, but never without care.

*How's the Peterson pitch going?* he'd write, and then, an hour later, if I hadn't answered: *No rush. I know you're in it.*

He never asked twice. He never asked why I took so long to reply, or why some days I didn't reply at all. I'd catch myself checking my phone anyway, thumb hovering over his name before I even decided to, and then I'd frown at myself in the reflection of my dark screen like I'd been caught doing something wrong.

One Tuesday, the front desk buzzed me at one o'clock. "Package for you, Ms. Spencer."

It was a sandwich. Turkey, avocado, the mustard on the side because I'd mentioned once, months ago, that I liked to control how much I used. No note. Just a receipt folded in half, and on the back, in blue pen: *You forget to eat when you're stressed. I remember things.*

I ate at my desk and didn't taste a bite of it, too busy staring at his handwriting like it might tell me something I wasn't ready to know.

The mug showed up a week later. Outside my apartment door, no bag, no card, just sitting there on the mat like it had always belonged. Robin's egg blue, the exact shade I'd once described — half-drunk, half-laughing — as "my grandmother's kitchen, if kitchens could be a color." I hadn't thought he was listening. I don't think I'd thought about that conversation again until I was standing in my hallway holding a stranger's kindness in both hands.

On the bottom, someone had drawn a small sun in permanent marker. Just a circle. A few crooked rays.

I put it in my cabinet and used it every morning after that, and told myself it didn't mean anything.

I started doing something else, too, that I didn't examine too closely. Before our coffee meetups — because that's what I called them, meetups, like we were colleagues comparing notes on a project — I'd stand in front of my closet longer than I needed to. I'd try on the green sweater, then the gray one, then go back to the green. I hadn't done that for Desmond in years. Somewhere along the way, dressing for him had become dressing *around* him — around his opinions, his ordering, his hands that decided things before I did.

I noticed the difference. I didn't say it out loud.

---

The Brooklyn café had a name I could never remember, tucked between a laundromat and a shop that sold nothing but candles. Eliam liked it because the coffee was strong and the chairs didn't match and nobody looked up when the door opened.

We sat by the window. Rain streaked the glass in slow, lazy lines. He wrapped both hands around his mug like he was cold, though it wasn't that cold outside.

"My mom used to sit like this," he said, not really to me, more to the window. "Hands around the cup. Like she was checking it was still warm before she let herself believe it."

I didn't say anything. I just waited, because something in his voice had changed, gone quieter, more careful.

"She was married for ten years to a guy who told her what to wear to church," he said. "Picked her friends for her. Cut her off from her sister for two years over some fight I still don't fully understand." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, like he was adjusting something invisible. "She stayed the whole time. Even after it got bad. Even after it got worse than bad."

"Why?" I asked. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

He looked at me then. Not with pity. Just steady.

"She said it was because she was grateful. He'd helped her out of a hard spot, way back when they first met — paid off some debt her dad left her with, helped her get on her feet. And she never stopped feeling like she owed him for it. Ten years of owing somebody for one good thing he did in year one."

He let that sit a second. The espresso machine hissed somewhere behind the counter. A woman at the next table laughed at something on her phone.

"It took her a long time to figure out that gratitude isn't the same thing as love," he said. "She used to say that, after. Like it was the whole lesson of her life, boiled down to one sentence."

He didn't look at me when he said it. He looked at the rain instead, like the words were meant for the window and I'd just happened to be sitting there.

Then he asked me if I'd tried the scone, because apparently it was better than it looked, and just like that we were talking about pastry, about nothing, about the terrible parking in this neighborhood.

I didn't answer his question about the scone. I stared down into my latte, at the pale foam going flat at the edges, and thought about Desmond's hand on the phone that day at the hospital. About a lighter with his family's initials. About seven staged mornings I'd spent apologizing for things I never did.

I didn't say anything for a long time.

But I didn't change the subject back, either.