The wife I forgot to love

Helena woke up at seven and lay still for a moment.

She was waiting for the weight. The particular heaviness that had been sitting on her chest every morning for the past two weeks. The first thought being Damian. The first feeling being loss. The first few seconds of every day being the worst few seconds because they were the ones where everything came back.

She waited.

It did not come.

She sat up slowly. Looked around the neutral apartment in the morning light. At the good knife on the counter. At the Christmas photo on the windowsill. At the jar of rosemary she had set next to it because it deserved to be somewhere it could be seen.

Something was different this morning.

She was not happy. She was not healed. She was not any of the things people meant when they said you would be fine. But she was awake and she was sitting up and the first thing she had thought about was not Damian Graves.

It was the text she had not answered.

And the smile she had gone to sleep with.

She made coffee. Real coffee, not the tea she had been making because tea required less thought and she had not had much thought to spare. She made it the way she liked it, strong and without sugar, the way she had always made it before she started making his first.

She was halfway through it when Cassidy knocked on the door.

"I brought food this time," Cassidy said, holding up a bag. "Real food. Not pasta. Actual breakfast like a person who has decided to live."

"I have decided to live," Helena said.

"You look like it." Cassidy came in and looked at her properly. At her face. At the coffee in her hand. At whatever was sitting differently in her eyes this morning. "Something happened."

"Come in and sit down."

"Something happened," Cassidy said again, sitting down at the small table with the focused energy of a woman who was not going to open the food bag until she had the information she needed. "Tell me right now."

Helena sat across from her. Wrapped both hands around her coffee. "I saw Camila yesterday. After the signing."

Cassidy went very still. "Where."

"Outside the building. She was coming out of a restaurant with someone. She saw me and walked over."

"She walked over."

"She said she never intended for things to happen this way."

Cassidy put both palms flat on the table. "And what did you say."

Helena looked at her sister. "I told her that what she intended did not matter to me. That what she did told me everything I needed to know about who she was." She paused. "And then I smiled at her and walked away."

The kitchen was quiet for exactly two seconds.

Then Cassidy stood up and did something she had never once done in their entire lives.

She clapped.

Slowly. Three times. Looking at Helena like she had never seen her before and was deciding she very much liked what she was seeing.

"That is my sister," Cassidy said. "That is exactly my sister."

"Sit down Cassidy."

"I am sitting down." She sat down. She was not sitting down in any meaningful way. She was perched on the edge of the chair with the contained energy of someone who wanted to run a lap around the apartment. "Is that everything?"

Helena looked at her coffee. "Damian texted me last night."

Cassidy's expression shifted. "What did it say."

"I miss you."

The table was quiet.

"He signed the divorce papers yesterday morning," Helena said. "And texted I miss you at eleven at night."

Cassidy picked up the food bag. Put it down. Picked it up again. Set it down with very deliberate care like she was making a decision about what her hands were going to do instead of what she actually wanted them to do.

"Did you respond," she said.

"No."

"Good."

"I put the phone face down and told the apartment he did not get to miss me."

Cassidy looked at her. Something moved across her face that was not quite a smile and not quite tears but was somewhere in the complicated space between the two. "How did you feel when you read it."

Helena thought about it honestly. "Angry," she said. "For the first time I just felt angry. Not sad. Not hurt. Just angry and done and a little bit like I was standing on the right side of something for the first time in a long time."

Cassidy nodded slowly. "Good," she said quietly. "That is exactly where you should be."

They ate breakfast. Real food, the kind Cassidy had brought because she had decided her sister was going to eat properly now and that was not a discussion. They sat in the morning light of the neutral apartment that was starting to smell less like nobody and more like coffee and rosemary and the specific combination of two women who had been through things together and were still sitting at the same table.

"I need to find a job," Helena said eventually.

"I know."

"A real one. Not just the Morrison account work. Something that is mine."

"I know," Cassidy said again. "What do you want to do."

Helena looked at the window. At the city outside going about its morning. "Something I am actually good at. Something where being honest matters. Something where I get to walk into a room and just be myself without managing anything."

Cassidy looked at her for a long moment. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out her phone and put it on the table between them.

"Jordan Park called me this morning," she said.

Helena looked at the phone. "Jordan Park."

"The director. She could not reach you so she called me. I had given her my number at the casting as an alternate contact." Cassidy slid the phone across the table. "She wants to offer you the role officially. She says you were the only person she saw in two days of casting who walked in carrying something real."

Helena looked at her sister's phone on the table between them.

She thought about a woman with direct eyes asking her to talk about a time something ended that she thought would last forever.

She thought about the four minutes she had talked without stopping and not once felt like she was performing anything.

She thought about the list in her notes app. Figure out what Helena actually wants.

She picked up the phone and called Jordan Park back.

It rang twice.

"Helena," Jordan said. Like she had been expecting her.

"I heard you called," Helena said.

"I did. I wanted to tell you directly that the role is yours if you want it. Three weeks of filming. Paid. And I think." Jordan paused for a moment. "I think this might be the beginning of something for you if you let it be. I have been making films for fifteen years and I know a face that a camera loves when I see one. Yours is one of them."

Helena looked at Cassidy across the table. At the woman who had driven over at ten at night with nothing and sat on a bed and held her hand. At the sister who had been there for every single version of this.

"Yes," Helena said into the phone. "I want it."

She ended the call.

Cassidy was already smiling.

"Don't," Helena said.

"I am not doing anything," Cassidy said, smiling wider.

"You are doing the face."

"I do not have a face."

"Cassidy."

"I'm just sitting here," Cassidy said, "watching my sister start her actual life."

Helena looked at her. At the Christmas photo on the windowsill. At the rosemary on the counter. At the apartment that was starting to feel less neutral and more like somewhere a person had decided to be.

She picked up her coffee.

And for the second morning in a row she did not think about Damian Graves first.

That felt like something worth keeping.

She was still sitting there when her phone buzzed on the counter.

She looked at it without picking it up.

It was not Damian this time.

It was a name she had not seen in a very long time. A name that belonged to a chapter of her life she had closed so completely she had almost forgotten it existed.

Her hand hovered over the phone.

Because whoever was on the other end of that message knew things about her and Damian that nobody else knew. Things that went all the way back to the beginning. Things that could change everything she thought she understood about why her marriage had fallen apart in the first place.

She picked up the phone.

And read the message.

And sat very still for a long time after.