Sabrina stood, then sat again. She cried. Sometimes she spoke, sometimes she waited for me to comfort her, and once she reached across the table as though muscle memory might carry my hand into hers. I moved my hand away, not to punish her but because I could not offer an embrace and still say what needed to be said.
At 1:40 in the morning she gathered a bag and called her sister. I listened to the car start outside and watched its taillights disappear around the corner. Then I went upstairs, lay fully dressed on top of the bed, and remained awake until dawn. Around five I got up to drink water and found her wedding photograph on the mantel, tilted slightly as if the house itself had begun to lean.
The next morning Malik met me at the office before anybody else arrived. He was forty-one, built like a man who still moved heavy equipment because he didn't trust anyone else to do it correctly, and had been my friend since a vocational engineering course fifteen years earlier. He could tell when something was wrong by the way I stacked folders. That morning I had sorted the same set of invoices three times and still couldn't remember which subcontractor needed payment.
"Tell me what's happening," he said.
I tried to give him the short version. I made it halfway through the hotel corridor before my throat closed. Malik took the folder from my hands, set it on the desk, and waited without looking away. We had spent years talking over drill noise and construction schedules; silence was not a thing either of us feared.
When I finished, he sat back in his chair. "You want me to come by tonight?"
"For what?"
"To make sure you eat something. Or to tell you you're an idiot if you decide to drive to that man's office and tear the place apart." He paused. "Whatever version of friendship you need."
I told him I wasn't going to fight Colin. Malik nodded as though he had been waiting to hear it. He said the business could survive a week without me answering every call, that our crews knew their work, and that I had earned the right to have something terrible happen without pretending it was just another item on the schedule.
"I keep thinking there must have been a moment I could have prevented it," I admitted.
"There might have been moments you could've noticed something was wrong with your marriage," he said. "That's not the same as causing what she chose to do. Don't mix those up."
Malik's wife, Lena, was a family-law attorney, although that was not why I had trusted him. He offered to ask her for a referral to someone outside their household so I wouldn't feel uncomfortable discussing property with the wife of my business partner. I accepted. By lunchtime I had an appointment with attorney Rebecca Hale for the following afternoon.