“Please.”
“I’m not calling to fight.”
I stood in my kitchen.
Coffee in one hand.
“What do you want?”
Another pause.
Then the sentence that caught me completely off guard.
“Nico is engaged.”
I thought I had heard wrong.
“What?”
“He was engaged before Mallorca.”
Silence.
Lara laughed once.
It sounded terrible.
“I didn’t know.”
I put the coffee down.
“What are you talking about?”
“He and his girlfriend had been separated.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“They weren’t.”
“She found my messages.”
“Called me.”
Lara started crying.
I said nothing.
“She says they’ve been together four years.”
“They were having problems.”
“But they weren’t broken up.”
“Apparently he proposed to her two months before he started talking to me again.”
I leaned against the counter.
The irony was so obvious I did not need to say it.
Lara said it herself.
“I know.”
“What?”
“I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
“No, you don’t.”
“That I deserved it.”
I looked out the window.
“I don’t think anybody deserves being lied to.”
Lara became quiet.
That answer seemed to hurt more than cruelty would have.
She whispered:
“I did the same thing to you.”
“Yes.”
“I understand that now.”
I said nothing.
She continued.
“He told me you didn’t understand me.”
“That you cared more about schedules than me.”
“That we had become boring.”
“That he and I had unfinished business.”
“And I wanted to believe it.”
“Nico didn’t invent your choices.”
“I know.”
That mattered.
Five weeks earlier, Lara would have blamed him.
Now she said:
“I know.”
She breathed shakily.
“I called because I need to apologize.”
“You already apologized when we moved out.”
“No.”
“I said I was sorry you were hurt.”
“That isn’t the same.”
She was right.
“What are you sorry for?”
“For making your reaction the problem.”
“For calling you controlling every time you noticed something I did not want to explain.”
“For letting you work overtime while I was questioning whether I even wanted to marry you.”
“For telling Nico we were basically over while asking you to transfer money for wedding lighting.”
That one almost made me laugh.
I didn’t.
“And for Mallorca.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“I kept telling myself nothing physical had happened yet, so somehow I was still a good person.”
“Yet?”
I asked before I could stop myself.
Lara became quiet.
Then:
“We kissed.”
There it was.
“When?”
“The first night.”
I closed my eyes.
I had already assumed something happened.
Hearing it still mattered.
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No.”
She answered honestly.
“I don’t expect anything.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“Why call now?”
“Because I wanted to tell you before someone else did.”
“You didn’t owe me details anymore.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
She began crying again.
“Because for five weeks I’ve been telling everyone you blew up our life over jealousy.”
“And when his fiancée called me, she sent screenshots.”