My Boyfriend Drugged Me to Fake My Affairs

He caught up to me on the sidewalk, coat forgotten, breath fogging in the cold.

"Wren. Wait." He grabbed my elbow. "You can't just say something like that and walk out."

I turned. Watched his face do the thing it always did — pleading, wounded, sure of its own charm.

"I can," I said. "I just did."

"Five minutes." His grip tightened. "Give me five minutes. Please."

I don't know why I went back in. Maybe some old, tired part of me needed to see it through to the end, needed proof I wasn't imagining the shape of what he was. So I let him lead me back to the table, back to the scallops going cold under their little dome of steam, and I sat down like a woman watching her own trial.

"Okay," I said. "Talk."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Reached for my hand again, and I let him take it because I wanted to feel exactly nothing, and I did.

"I know I haven't been —"

His phone buzzed against the white tablecloth. Once. Then again, harder, skittering an inch toward the candle.

He glanced down. And I watched his whole face change.

Not a flicker this time. A total transformation, like someone had reached in and flipped a switch behind his eyes. His jaw went tight. His shoulders came up around his ears. He was already half out of his seat before he even looked at me.

"It's Nyra," he said. "She's having a panic attack. Downtown. She's alone, Wren, I have to —"

"Go," I said.

He blinked, like he expected a fight. Like some part of him wanted one, wanted me to grab his sleeve the way he'd just grabbed mine on the sidewalk, wanted proof that I still cared enough to beg.

I didn't move.

"I'll call you," he said, already patting his pockets for his wallet. He dropped two folded bills on the table without counting them. "I'm sorry. I have to — she doesn't have anyone else."

"She has a therapist," I said. "You told me about the therapist. Over dinner. Two nights ago."

He wasn't listening. He was already moving, weaving between tables, phone pressed to his ear before he even hit the door. I watched him say something into it, something soft, something urgent, the same voice he never once used for me in a hospital hallway at four in the morning.

The door swung shut behind him. The bell over it rang, cheerful and stupid.

I sat there.

The waiter came by once, refilled my water, didn't ask. The couple at the next table glanced over, then away, embarrassed for me in that specific way strangers get embarrassed for someone they've decided to feel sorry for.

I didn't cry. I watched the candle gutter in its glass. I counted my own breaths, slow, even, the way Grandma Millie used to tell me to when I was small and scared of thunder. *In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.* I did that until ten minutes had passed exactly, watched on my phone, because some stubborn part of me needed the number to mean something.

Then I picked up my bag and walked out into the cold.

---

A car idled at the curb, headlights off, hazards blinking soft and orange against the wet street. I almost walked past it. Then the passenger window rolled down.

"You looked cold in there," Eliam said. "Figured you might be cold out here too."

He was holding a cup. Iced latte, oat milk, the little green sticker on the side. I hadn't told him my order in weeks. I'd mentioned it once, in passing, months ago, a throwaway line over drinks I didn't think he'd even registered.

He'd registered it.

I got in. The heat inside the car hit me like something physical, and for a second I just sat there, cup in my lap, condensation cooling my palm.

He didn't ask what happened. He didn't ask why my mascara was a little smudged, or why I'd walked out of a restaurant alone at nine forty on a Tuesday.

"I made you a new playlist," he said instead, pulling away from the curb. "Track seven's really good. I think about you every time it comes on, which is a little embarrassing to admit out loud, but here we are."

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, surprised and a little wet, and I caught my own face in the side mirror — startled, wide-eyed, like I didn't recognize the woman laughing in a stranger's passenger seat two blocks from the worst dinner of her life.

We drove in silence after that, easy, unhurried, streetlights sliding gold across the windshield.

"You know," Eliam said eventually, eyes on the road, "that restaurant charges eighteen dollars for valet. I looked it up while I was waiting. Eighteen dollars just to park a car."

"Terrible," I said.

"Criminal," he agreed. "I'm reporting them to somebody."

I laughed again, softer this time, and leaned my head back against the seat, and let the city blur past the window — bright, indifferent, endless — while somewhere behind us, Desmond was holding another woman's hand in a bar bathroom, certain I'd still be waiting when he remembered to come back.

I wasn't.