The soft, intimate smile playing on his lips was one he’d always reserved for me. Now it belonged in her text messages.
“Another one?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, cracking the eggs into the pan with more force than necessary. “This is the third crisis this month.”
“Her ex is stalking her. She’s scared, Hannah.”
Marcus, the supposed ex-boyfriend, had supposedly been stalking Charlotte for six months. Oddly, this “stalking” only happened on Thursday afternoons, precisely during Tyler’s longest lunch break. Oddly, the police never actually got involved. However, I learned that defending Charlotte was Tyler’s new religion, and I was an atheist. Instead, I simply reminded him about my dinner.
His response was a dagger of predictability. “I’ll try, but if Charlotte needs me…”
She would need it. She always did on Thursdays.
Six months ago, Tyler brought Charlotte to my pharmacy at Riverside General for the first time. He said she needed medication for anxiety. I watched from behind the counter as she laughed, touching his arm in a way that was casual, intimate, and deeply familiar.
“She’s going through a difficult divorce,” he later explained.
“She has no one else she can really talk to.”
It started with a casual lunch. Soon, it became every Thursday, stretching to three hours while I worked the night shift. Then, one evening, I smelled something floral and expensive clinging to Tyler’s shirt. A scent that didn’t belong in our home.
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