Aaron's tall frame went very still. Deep brown skin, dark eyes, the trimmed beard that Lily liked to pat when she was small enough to think beards were toys — all of him arranged into a listening that felt like judgment. "Around how."
Simone sat on the edge of the bed. The polished makeup could not hide the exhaustion underneath. "I need you to let me tell it in order. If you interrupt to make it into the worst version first, I will still tell you the truth, but you will have spent your anger on a story that isn't the one I lived."
Aaron stood with his back to the window. The maple moved in the breeze. "Then tell it. In order. Starting with who the hell Isaiah Grant is to you."
Simone looked at her hands. The thin gold band. The small scar at the base of her thumb from a kitchen accident three Thanksgivings ago when Aaron had kissed the cut and called her dramatic and she had called him a bad nurse and they had laughed into the sweet potatoes like people who believed laughter was a renewable resource.
"Isaiah and I dated in college," she said. "Senior year at Howard. It ended badly. He left. I met you three years later at that fundraiser in Uptown. You know that part. What you don't know is that Isaiah contacted me fourteen months ago. His mother had died. He was in Charlotte for the funeral. He asked if we could have coffee. I said yes because I am not a person who refuses coffee to grief, and because I thought I was strong enough for a forty-minute conversation in a public place."
Aaron's jaw worked. "And."
"And the forty minutes became an hour. And then he asked if he could text sometimes. And then he did. And then I answered." Simone's voice stayed even. "It was not — at first — what you are already building in your head. It was memory. It was someone who knew the girl I was before I became Mrs. Blake. It was stupid and hungry and I told myself it was harmless because nothing physical happened for a long time."
"For a long time," Aaron repeated.