“Jason’s in town?”
“Apparently.”
“For how long?”
“Just the weekend.”
I nodded.
“Okay.”
She typed another message.
I watched her.
“So we’re meeting him?”
Her thumbs stopped.
“What?”
“I said, are we meeting him?”
That was not a trap.
If she had said yes, I would not have enjoyed it, but I would have gone.
I might have complained afterward.
I might have disliked every minute.
But I would have understood the basic idea.
Chloe had a past.
I had one too.
People from old chapters occasionally walked into current ones.
What mattered was whether the current relationship was treated as the primary reality.
Instead, Chloe locked her phone.
“We’re not.”
I thought I had misunderstood.
“We’re not what?”
“Meeting him together.”
She slipped the phone into her purse.
“It’s just me and Jason.”
I sat forward.
“Why?”
She gave a small sigh.
Not guilty.
Annoyed.
As though I had asked something tiresome.
“Because we have things to catch up on.”
“I understand that.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I didn’t say there was a problem.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“My face is trying to understand why your ex-boyfriend suddenly came into town and you’re getting dressed up to meet him alone.”
She rolled her eyes.
“There.”
“What?”
“That.”
“What did I do?”
“You made it weird.”
I laughed once because I genuinely could not believe the accusation.
“I made your private coffee date with the ex you used to call emotionally toxic weird?”
“It isn’t a date.”
“Fine.”
“Coffee.”
“Then why can’t I come?”
She stared at me.
That was the moment where the conversation could still have gone somewhere else.
She could have said she needed closure.
She could have admitted she was curious.
She could have told me Jason had reached out because of something specific from their past.
She could even have said she knew it looked strange and asked me to trust her.
We could have argued.
Maybe resolved it.
Maybe not.
Instead, something hardened in her expression.
For several weeks before that morning, I had noticed a subtle change in Chloe.
She had been more restless.
More interested in who from college was doing what.
More dissatisfied with ordinary things.
Our apartment suddenly seemed too small.
Our weekend routines too predictable.
My ten-year-old sedan became a joke she repeated too often.
Friends getting engaged made her happy for approximately five minutes before the happiness turned into comparison.
I had attributed it to stress.
Her marketing department was going through restructuring.
One of her closest friends had moved away.
Her thirty-first birthday had bothered her more than she admitted.
I thought we were approaching the point where she needed reassurance that our relationship was moving somewhere.
That was one reason I had bought the ring.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether Chloe felt the same pressure but translated it differently.
I saw stability and thought commitment.
She saw stability and began wondering whether she was missing excitement.
Jason represented excitement she had once survived and later romanticized from a safe distance.
But I did not know any of that yet.
I only knew she was staring at me like my existence had become inconvenient.
“We’re just going to catch up,” she said.