Work Text:
Lena wakes to the sound of distant church bells and the quiet threat of nausea. The villa is too warm, the shutters left ajar, sun creeping across the stone floor like it has a personal vendetta. She rolls to her side, squints at her phone, and confirms that she has, in fact, sent nothing. No calls. No texts. No voice notes. No impulsive middle-of-the-night emails with subject lines like Just One More Thing or About What I Said. There’s no response from Kara because there was never any message to respond to. She’d said it out loud, not into her phone but into a half-empty bottle of white wine, sun-stained and tipsy, sitting on a striped lawn chair and confessing, of all things, sincerity.
“If I ever got married,” Lena had said, not looking at Kara but somewhere just beyond her shoulder, at a hillside that did nothing to deserve being dragged into this, “I’d marry you.”
There had been silence, then a laugh, then more wine. No dramatic kisses. No last-minute trips to city hall. Just a warm breeze, a mosquito bite, and the slight embarrassment of having meant every word.
Two weeks later, she’s back in National City, hungover from reality now, the villa replaced by her sterile apartment and her espresso machine in a foul mood. She tries to work. Tries to pretend it wasn’t anything. She joins a charity committee for bioethical research and finds herself on a panel next to Jason Levenson, a man with mild opinions, excellent posture, and the conversational range of a well-edited podcast. He asks if she’d like to get a drink sometime, and Lena says yes because she’s still clinging to this idea that rationality might save her from whatever Kara Danvers did to her nervous system.
Jason is methodical. He books dinner reservations three weeks in advance and keeps a separate work phone so he ‘can be present in the moment’. He refers to their third date as ‘date three’ and brings up their compatibility score from some novelty quiz they took online as if it’s hard data. Lena is not swept off her feet, but she is, for a brief moment, steadied by his predictability. It feels like emotional scaffolding. She’s still bruised from the vineyard night - not because anything tragic happened, but because nothing did.
They make it to three months. Lena never lets him stay the night, and he never questions it. He kisses her like someone who believes in technique. He’s thoughtful in a way that’s hard to critique. He tells her she deserves someone uncomplicated. She pretends that’s not the cruelest thing anyone’s ever said to her.
The Post-It arrives on a Tuesday morning. She’s running late for a conference call and finds it stuck to her fridge, a pink square with one word: Bananas? Jason’s handwriting is rounded, neat. Lena stares at it longer than she means to. It’s meant to be charming. Domestic. Proof that he’s picturing a life together in the small, fruitless ways. And yet it hits her with the weight of a thesis - a quiet declaration that this man is building a future she has no interest in living inside.
She texts him that night. Says they should talk. He arrives looking cautiously optimistic. She makes tea and writes out a list of reasons it’s not working on her Notes app, not to show him but to keep herself from defaulting into guilt. She reads the first three aloud. He listens like he’s moderating a panel.
“I always knew I was your rebound.” Jason says when she finishes.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t be.” Lena replies, not cruelly but truthfully.
He nods. They don’t fight. He leaves behind a toothbrush and a box of chamomile tea. She throws out both the next morning, then orders a new fridge, irrationally.
Later, she tells Andrea that it ended because of a Post-It. Andrea says, “You know what your problem is? You think everything is a sign.”
“It wasn’t the note. It was the handwriting. The handwriting told me everything I needed to know.”
Andrea laughs until her mascara runs. Lena sips her drink and thinks about how Kara’s handwriting used to slope sideways when she was tired, like it was leaning on her for balance. Thinks about the yellow legal pad she once filled with alternate endings to Kaleidoscope just to make Lena laugh. Thinks about how the best things in life never come formatted.
Jason texts two days later to ask if they can remain on friendly terms. Lena says of course, knowing they won’t. He was never the villain. He just wasn’t Kara, and it’s not fair, but it’s also not untrue.
She deletes his number, clears her kitchen of all food-related stationery, and tells herself this was a first step. Then she opens Instagram, sees that Kara’s posted a picture of her new press credentials, and likes it before she can stop herself.
The heart icon fills red. Immediate. Final.
She shuts her phone off and pours a glass of white wine, knowing full well this is how it always begins.
*
Lena meets Rebecca at a pharmacy innovation summit, which already sounds like a place where romance goes to die, but the keynote panel is accidentally double-booked, and the organizers ask Lena if she can compress her talk to eight minutes. She agrees, breezily, like she’s not quietly enraged, then rewrites her speech in twenty minutes flat and delivers it like a TED Talk on fire. When she wraps, there’s a smattering of applause and one audible “Okay, but that’s not how the FDA classifies dosage variability” from the back row.
That’s Rebecca. Curly hair, black boots, voice like she’s just walked out of a courtroom drama and is underwhelmed by everyone’s performance. Later at the mixer, Lena finds her at the bar, orders a drink two feet to the left, and pretends she hasn’t noticed her.
“You didn’t answer my question.” Rebecca says, without preamble.
Lena sips her Campari and says, “You didn’t ask it very well.”
This, somehow, is foreplay. They argue about controlled substances for an hour and a half and end up back in Rebecca’s hotel room with half their clothes and all their common sense somewhere on the floor.
Lena wakes up feeling reckless and alive. Rebecca steals her espresso pod the next morning and calls it a hostile acquisition. Lena laughs harder than she has in months.
They start dating. Or something that passes for it. Rebecca is late to everything, drinks black coffee like it’s an identity, and never checks the weather before leaving the house. She kisses Lena like it’s a dare and texts exclusively in lowercase, something Lena puts down to the age difference. Lena finds her equal parts infuriating and magnetic, which is precisely the problem.
Rebecca insists on open windows even in January, believes scented candles are a capitalist trap, and once tried to seduce Lena during a board meeting by sending her a text that read what would you do if i said I want you to tie me up. Lena had to excuse herself, allegedly for a coughing fit. It was not a proud day.
They fight. Often. Sometimes loudly, sometimes in code, sometimes in front of horrified waitstaff. They make up in elevators, alleyways, borrowed bathrooms. The highs are cinematic. The lows are structural damage.
What undoes them, in the end, is far less dramatic. Lena opens up about something that matters - a memory from boarding school, brittle and sharp - and Rebecca listens for exactly ten seconds before redirecting to a work anecdote about how men in pharma are scared of her. She tells it like a victory. Lena hears it like a verdict.
The silence that follows is a new flavor for them. They don’t yell. They don’t slam anything. Lena just stops responding mid-sentence and Rebecca goes, “What now?” like she’s asking about the weather.
“I need someone who listens.” Lena says, eventually.
“I hear you just fine.” Rebecca replies, which is either irony or ignorance. Lena’s not sure which is worse.
Rebecca leaves wearing Lena’s hoodie. It’s charcoal grey, oversized, a limited edition from some Gotham tech expo that Lena only attended for the networking and the free espresso. She doesn’t ask for it back. She doesn’t care about the hoodie, not really. She cares that it looked like permanence and ended up being exit wear.
Lena throws herself into work for the next few weeks. Jack invites her out one night and tells her she looks like someone who’s been ghostwriting her own therapy.
“Didn’t you say you liked her?” Jack asks, eyebrow raised, when Lena mentions how hot the arguments were.
“I liked the way she argued,” Lena corrects. “I didn’t like that she thought winning was the point.”
Jack raises his glass to that. Lena finishes her drink too fast and changes the subject.
The next morning, Lena finds Rebecca’s Spotify still logged in on her kitchen speaker. She scrolls through the playlists. One is titled dopamine if it was brunette and angry. Lena snorts, logs out, and plays Bach just to feel like herself again.
A week later, Kara publishes a piece on an underfunded drug trial Lena’s foundation rejected two years ago. The writing is incisive. Fair. Painfully fair. Lena reads it three times and closes her laptop only when she catches herself rereading the pull quote Kara chose: Sometimes the people who want to help are the ones who won’t look at you while you bleed.
She wonders if Kara meant anything by it. She wonders why she’s still wondering.
*
The thing about Panos is that he enters rooms like he’s been carved from weather and myth - tan, unsmiling, silk-shirted, with the social graces of a man who’s never been told no in a language he understands. They meet at a fundraiser in London where Lena is trying to dodge three board members and a scandal about lab rats. Panos slides in between conversations with the precision of a diplomat and the confidence of a Bond villain. He doesn’t introduce himself - he assumes she knows who he is, and, irritatingly, she does. Panos Thalassinos: Greek real estate heir, former Olympian, rumoured to have dated a minor royal and a major pop star.
He asks her what her exit strategy is, apropos of nothing. She replies, “For the event?” and he says, “For life.” like it’s small talk.
They sleep together that night. Not because she’s swept off her feet, but because she’s bored, he’s compelling, and she’s a little drunk on gin and neglect. He calls her Elena like it’s an inheritance. She doesn’t correct him, because she doesn’t plan to see him again.
She does see him again.
And again.
He sends her rare books and marble paperweights. One time, a Cartier watch arrives at her office without a note. She sends it back, and he sends it again, this time with a note that says You forgot this on my yacht. He thinks this is charming. Lena thinks it’s troubling. Andrea thinks it’s hot and tells her not to overthink it.
The yacht is real. She boards it three weeks later, against her better judgment, after a particularly bleak board meeting and a text from Panos that reads Hydra? I’ll send the helicopter.
He doesn’t, thank god. She takes a regular flight.
The island is absurd - sun-bleached, terracotta-roofed, crawling with discreet staff and discreet wealth. Lena drinks wine that costs more than her first car and eats olives grown three feet from where she’s sitting. Panos gives her a tour of the property with the air of someone showing off a new suit.
They swim. They have sex that is technically impressive but emotionally inert. Panos bites when he kisses. Lena tolerates it. She feels like she’s in a perfume ad she didn’t agree to film.
One night, she asks him - lightly, sarcastically - if this is all foreplay to a merger. He smiles and says, “Maybe. But I’d also marry you, if you asked nicely.”
She chokes on her wine. He doesn’t notice.
Later, sprawled across a chaise in loose linen and ego, he mentions Kara. Casually, almost fondly. Something about how she once interviewed him and refused to be charmed. He calls her ‘your little journalist’. Lena says nothing.
He goes on. “She was never a real threat, anyway. Too provincial. Not ambitious enough.”
Lena’s vision sharpens like glass under pressure. She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t flinch. She simply finishes her drink, thanks him for the evening, and texts her assistant to book a 6 AM flight. He doesn’t follow her. He doesn’t text.
Sam is scandalized when she hears the story. “You left Hydra at dawn? That’s Greek tragedy chic.”
Lena replies, “It’s better than staying and becoming an allegory.”
The watch reappears at her office a week later, this time in red velvet. She donates it to a silent auction and writes thank you for the weekend on the donation slip out of habit, or guilt, or force of routine.
She never hears from Panos again, though she does see him once - on a red carpet, arm linked with a singer who recently survived a yacht fire. Lena thinks it’s poetic, but only briefly.
At home, she makes tea and opens the book Kara once lent her - annotated in blue pen, with tiny margin notes that are part grammar, part poetry, part Kara. One reads, I love the way this character lies to everyone but herself.
Lena rereads it until the words stop meaning anything, then places the book back on the shelf, spine out, like nothing’s changed.
*
Lena does not seek out McKenzie Lang, Pulitzer-winner, creative non-fiction evangelist, and woman most likely to describe herself as ‘difficult in the morning’. McKenzie arrives like a thunderstorm over clear skies, uninvited and unbothered. It starts with a feature request. The New Yorker is running a profile on the most influential women in philanthropic biotech, and Lena, unfortunately, qualifies.
They meet in a cafe that McKenzie selects - artisanal, aggressively beige, full of eucalyptus and regret. McKenzie is ten minutes late, orders a matcha with oat milk and a shot of espresso, and opens with, “I’ve read everything you’ve ever said in print, and I still don’t know who you are”. Lena is too tired to be defensive, so she says, “Maybe I’m not terribly interesting”. McKenzie replies, “I doubt that very much”, and then spends the next ninety minutes making Lena feel like she’s on trial for crimes she hasn’t committed yet.
She’s magnetic. Condescending. Stylish in a way that implies someone else did the thinking. She wears red lipstick before noon and quotes Sontag like scripture. Lena loathes her. Then accepts an invitation to dinner.
The piece gets published two weeks later. It’s flattering. Viciously so. Lena’s described as ‘a brilliant if occasionally oblique figure in the world of ethical innovation’ with ‘a face that belongs in grayscale’ and ‘a mind like a surgical scalpel - precise, cold, and sometimes pointed at herself’. It’s not inaccurate. It’s also somehow intimate. Like being flayed and then handed a cashmere robe.
They start seeing each other after that. Dinner becomes routine. So does sleep. McKenzie is a collector - of stories, gestures, people. She tucks Lena’s hair behind her ear mid-argument. She leaves annotated poetry collections on Lena’s nightstand, each one chosen to sting. She calls Lena “honey” in a tone that lands just south of sarcasm.
Lena enjoys it more than she should. It’s performative, yes, but at least it’s honest about it. They go to book launches and argue about structure. They attend charity events and pretend not to be watching each other from across the room. McKenzie writes notes on napkins. Lena steals them.
But after a while, the performance begins to wear. There’s a night - mid-November, Lena exhausted from a week of investor calls - when she opens up. Really opens up. Tells McKenzie something about her mother she’s never said aloud. It’s not poetic. Just raw, unedited, dull around the edges from lack of use.
McKenzie’s quiet for a beat. Then she says, “That’s beautiful. I’m putting that in my novel.”
Lena stares at her like she’s trying to make the silence do damage. McKenzie blinks. “What?”
“That wasn’t a pitch,” Lena says, calmly. “It was a memory.”
McKenzie shrugs. “Everything’s both.”
The rest of the evening is quiet. Chilly. Lena lies awake next to her for hours, watching the ceiling like it owes her something. McKenzie sleeps with a silk mask and no remorse.
The next morning, Lena texts: I think you’re brilliant, but I need someone who sees me as a person, not a paragraph.
McKenzie replies: That’s beautiful. Mind if I use it?
Lena blocks the number mid-eye roll.
Andrea is the first to hear the story, told over martinis and blistering sarcasm. “You dated your own profile piece. That’s either deeply narcissistic or tragic.”
That ends the conversation.
A week later, Lena finds an old email chain from Kara, half-buried in her archives. It’s dated three years ago, sent at 1:13 AM. Kara had been fact-checking an article and asked if Lena’s foundation had ever funded a particular AI trial. The body of the email is polite, professional, entirely aboveboard. But the subject line still reads: hi hi hi, don’t delete me yet.
Lena hadn’t replied.
She stares at it for too long. Marks it unread. Shuts her laptop like it’s accused her of something unkind.
*
Amanda enters Lena’s life the way most bad ideas do: through a charitable auction and a dare. Andrea is on the planning committee for an absurdly high-profile arts fundraiser and convinces Lena to attend by promising no speeches, just scandal. The entertainment for the evening is a fire performance - one of those overproduced yet somehow feral acts where women breathe flame and pretend it’s subtle. Lena isn’t impressed, until Amanda steps onstage.
She’s barefoot, masc, wearing black leather and smudged eyeliner. She exhales fire like it’s a language, then winks directly at Lena from the stage. Lena, who does not respond to winks, responds. She doesn’t remember how the rest of the evening goes. Just that Amanda appears beside her at the bar around midnight and says, “You look like someone who needs to be kissed badly.”
Lena laughs. Amanda doesn’t. Lena sleeps with her anyway.
What follows is not a relationship. It’s an event. Amanda appears and disappears on her own schedule, usually with ash on her hands and glitter in her bag. She takes Lena to industrial parties in abandoned buildings, introduces her to people with single names and multiple piercings, and calls her ‘baby’ only when mocking her.
They have sex that’s half battle, half catharsis. Amanda is relentless - verbally, physically, emotionally. She tells Lena she’s too pretty to be that repressed and once critiques her orgasm like it’s a dress rehearsal. Lena should hate it. Sometimes she does. But sometimes it feels like burning down the last thing that still made her careful.
Amanda doesn’t ask questions. She makes pronouncements. She tells Lena she’s built like a contradiction and tastes like a metaphor. Lena asks her, “Do you talk like this to everyone?” Amanda replies, “Only the girls who look like God forgot to make them safe.”
It lasts twenty-seven days.
The end comes, unexpectedly, during a performance. Lena goes to see her - late, unannounced, half-hoping it will end in something cinematic. Amanda finishes her set, then ignores Lena completely. Not in cruelty, just in practiced detachment. Like Lena was never there. Like she is just one more woman in a long line of women with expensive shoes and expensive grief.
They go out after, with Amanda’s troupe - people named things like Smoke and Rapture and Ben. Lena tries to engage, to connect, to say something that matters.
Amanda leans in at one point and says, “You’re trying too hard to be known. Just be hot.”
Lena replies, “I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive.”
Amanda shrugs. “You’re a backdrop, babe. An elegant one. But still.”
It’s not rage that hits Lena, but clarity. Cold and sharp. She finishes her drink, stands up, and says, “I hope you say that onstage. At least then it’ll be performance.”
Lena doesn’t look back. Doesn’t check her phone for a text that never comes.
Sam laughs too hard when she hears the story. “You dated a fire dancer. Of course it ended in ashes.”
“I didn’t date her,” Lena says. “I survived her.”
She goes home, opens a bottle of wine, and tries to remember the last time someone actually asked her a question. Not a leading one, not a literary one. A question meant to see her, not summarize her.
She thinks of Kara.
Not the bachelorette-night Kara. Not the journalist-with-an-ethics-complex Kara. But the Kara who once texted at 2 AM, are you awake? I want to tell you something but it might ruin everything, and then didn’t say another word until Lena replied simply, tell me anyway.
She never did.
Lena still wants to know what it was.
*
Spencer comes in quiet.
Which, after Amanda, feels like silk after sandpaper. She’s introduced to Lena through Jack at a theatre benefit - someone’s new play about post-capitalist intimacy that Lena doesn’t understand and Spencer helped dramaturg but won’t defend. She’s compact, brunette, soft-voiced. Her shoes are scuffed. Her jokes are dry. When Lena says she doesn’t really do theatre, Spencer replies, “That’s alright. Most of it doesn’t do itself either.”
They get drinks afterward. Spencer drinks whiskey and makes fun of people who refer to first dates as interviews. Lena’s shoulders drop. She doesn’t know she’s been braced for months.
What follows is not a sweep. It’s a crawl, in the best sense of the word. Spencer makes her feel steady. Not breathless, not derailed - just quietly wanted. They start slow. Texts, dinners, a kiss on the third date that lands like punctuation rather than epiphany.
Spencer leaves notes in Lena’s books - questions, not declarations. She always gets the tea order right. She doesn’t mind when Lena spirals, just sits with her until the jaggedness recedes. When Lena asks what she’s thinking, Spencer tells her. No games. No dramatic silences. No biting commentary masquerading as charm.
It’s simple. It’s mutual. It lasts.
Lena finds herself forgetting to check Kara’s social media. She no longer searches for keywords in their iMessage thread, doesn't look at screenshots where Kara used nicknames she wouldn't let anyone else get away with. She goes days without picturing the shape of a smile meant only for her. She deletes a folder named Drafts for Her and doesn’t make a new one. It feels almost like progress.
They make it nearly a year.
Spencer moves in after nine months. She brings books, mismatched mugs, a blanket that smells like cloves. Lena buys new linen sheets and lets her. There’s no ceremony. Just two people deciding, jointly, not to be lonely anymore.
But Spencer is a playwright. Which means eventually, she writes it all down.
The show is called The Second Choice. Lena doesn’t read the script. She’s busy, distracted, out of the loop until opening night. She goes alone, in a dress Spencer picked. Sits three rows from the front.
The protagonist is a woman in a sharp suit with a sharper mouth. Brilliant. Guarded. Unknowable, until she isn’t. She falls in love with a girl who glows like sunrise, says things like I want you to want me, and waits at train stations. The woman does not say it back. The woman waits too long. The woman, in the final scene, is left in a library holding a book she never finished.
Lena does not cry. She does not leave. She watches until the lights come up, then goes backstage and kisses Spencer on the cheek.
“It was good.” She says, and means it.
They don’t talk about it until days later. Spencer says, “You know it wasn’t about you.”
Lena says, “It was all about me. That’s the problem.”
Spencer exhales through her nose, tired. “What was I supposed to do? Pretend you weren’t always elsewhere?”
Lena opens her mouth, then closes it. She thinks about Kara’s name spoken out loud in years-old fights. About smiles she gave away too freely. About all the people she dated to forget someone she never truly let go.
Spencer leaves a week later. She’s kind about it. Doesn’t pack in a rage. Just takes her books, her mugs, her clove-smelling blanket. Leaves behind a note Lena doesn’t read. Lena keeps it anyway, in the drawer where she once stored concert tickets and old voicemails.
When Jack hears, he offers tequila. Andrea offers sarcasm. Sam sends soup. Lena says she’s fine, and for the first time in her life, everyone believes her a little too easily.
She goes back to work. She stops posting on Instagram. She answers her emails at strange hours and avoids the mirror above her dresser because it still catches a glimpse of them in passing.
Kara’s name doesn’t come up. But she’s there, humming underneath it all. In the questions Spencer never dared ask. In the versions of herself Lena keeps locking away. In the play’s final monologue, where the woman says, I thought I had time.
Lena knows better now.
*
It’s Sam who organizes it, which is already suspicious. Sam doesn’t organize brunch unless someone’s dead or newly single, and Lena is, unfortunately, only one of those. Jack is looped in for the comic relief. Andrea claims she was forced but shows up in full makeup and an outfit that suggests otherwise. The reservation is at some aggressively seasonal farm-to-table spot where the menus are printed on recycled stock and the servers act like eye contact is a war crime.
Lena arrives late. Deliberately. She’s not trying to make an entrance - she just can’t decide whether this is a social obligation or an ambush. Turns out it’s both.
Sam orders a carafe of mimosas before Lena sits down. Jack raises his glass like they’re at a funeral. Andrea waves a fork. “Spencer, huh?”
Lena sighs. “Can we not.”
Jack leans in. “Come on. I need the post-mortem. Did she leave in the night? Did she monologue? Was there a tragic scarf involved?”
Lena says nothing. Sips. Waits for the pity to roll in like fog.
It doesn’t.
Instead, Andrea changes the subject with surgical precision, and for a while it’s safe. They talk about Andrea’s new editor, Jack’s brief stint with a Pilates instructor named Simone, Sam’s daughter Ruby applying to MIT early. The food arrives. Lena manages two bites of an aggressively deconstructed avocado toast. Then, without ceremony or warning, she says, “Maybe it always goes wrong because none of them are Kara.”
The silence is immediate and catastrophic.
Andrea actually puts down her fork.
Jack blinks twice, slowly. “Kara?”
Sam just says, “Oh no.”
“The journalist?” Andrea asks, incredulous.
“Danvers?” Jack adds. “You mean the one you used to pick fights with like it was a contact sport? The one you simped over so hard you forgot how verbs worked?”
“I didn’t simp.” Lena says, indignantly.
“You got nothing done for six months,” Andrea says. “You started writing emails in lowercase. You called a marketing intern ‘Kara’ once. Her name was Rachel.”
Lena shrugs. “It was a confusing time.”
Jack whistles. “This is about the bachelorette thing, isn’t it?”
Sam frowns. “What bachelorette thing?”
Andrea looks delighted. “You don’t know? At Nia’s bachelorette. They shared a bottle of wine, Lena made a speech about imaginary rings, Kara cried, and then nothing happened because they’re both emotionally constipated.”
Lena glares. “That’s not what happened.”
Jack deadpans, “Did or did not one of you say ‘If I ever got married, it would be to you’?”
“That’s not a direct quote.”
“You carved her initials in a wine barrel.”
Lena says nothing. She remembers the night with an uncomfortable clarity - Kara’s laugh, the stars, the way the air felt charged like a storm no one was brave enough to call weather.
Andrea tops up the mimosas. “So let me guess. You dated Jason, Bex, Panos, McKenzie, Amanda, and Spencer because… what? Kara set an impossibly high bar?”
“She had this smile.” Lena says, and instantly regrets it.
All three groan.
“Everyone has a smile, babe.” Jack mutters.
“She had one she only used with me.” Lena insists, and hates how small her voice sounds saying it. “It was… inconvenient.”
Andrea snorts. “You need to start lying to yourself more effectively.”
“She called me the girl of her dreams once.” Lena adds, helplessly.
Jack stares at her. “That’s… objectively awful.”
Sam’s watching her. Not laughing. Not judging. Just watching.
Lena continues, softly now, a little drunker than she realized. “I sent her a nude once. Not trashy. Artistic. Boobs looked amazing. She ignored them entirely and sent back a paragraph about the mole cluster near my collarbone and how it looked like Orion’s Belt and how she wanted to kiss the dip of skin like it was a wishbone.”
Andrea covers her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“She said my skin looked like a constellation,” Lena finishes. “And then ghosted me for a week.”
Jack pushes his mimosa away. “This is too much. I feel like I’m trapped in a verse of a Lorde song.”
Lena’s halfway through her third mimosa when she sets the glass down with a little too much ceremony and says, “She once told me she loved my voice.”
Jack doesn’t look up from spearing a roasted tomato. “Oh no.”
“I was explaining cap table dilution,” Lena continues, tone innocent, eyes distant. “You know, walking her through equity splits and founder stakes and vesting cliffs -”
“Very sexy.” Andrea mutters into her napkin.
“- and she just… giggled,” Lena says, like it still haunts her. “In the middle of my very clear, very structured explanation.”
“She giggled,” Jack repeats flatly. “In the face of a financial model.”
“Yes.”
“And this is a good memory?”
“It wasn’t just the giggle,” Lena says, which is exactly the kind of sentence that never ends well. “She said she didn’t understand a word I said, but that she loved my voice. Then tried to take notes but just wrote my name over and over in the margins of her notebook.”
Andrea makes a strangled noise. “Okay. That’s enough. I’m cutting you off. You’re too tipsy and too wistful and I cannot be here when you accidentally sext her your pitch deck.”
Sam’s not laughing. She’s watching Lena like she’s trying to see under the words. “Did you love her then?”
“I don’t think I ever stopped.” Lena says, and somehow it’s the calmest thing she’s said all morning.
There’s a long pause. Then Jack groans theatrically. “Jesus Christ, Lena, just marry her and get it over with.”
“I’m not done,” Lena says, annoyingly composed now. “Her hands.”
Andrea lifts a warning finger. “If you say the word ‘soft,’ I’m leaving.”
“They were ridiculously soft,” Lena says anyway. “Like, disarmingly so. I asked once if she moisturized. She said no, claimed it was just genetics. I bought a whole new skincare routine.”
Jack has his head in his hands.
“She used to touch things like they might break,” Lena adds, quieter now. “Mugs, doorknobs, my wrist. Everything with this absurd gentleness, like the world was on loan and she meant to return it intact.”
Sam nods slowly. “And you let her go?”
“I thought I had time,” Lena says, eyes not on them now but somewhere far past the edge of the table, her voice soft - midnight, velvet, and all that. “And then I didn’t. I still think she meant it,” Lena mutters. “All of it.”
Sam places her glass down. She’s the only one not smiling.
“I think if you still believe she’s the one who got away,” she says, gently, “it’s time to get her back.”
Lena looks at her. Really looks at her. And it lands like a pin pulled from a grenade - quiet, but you feel it in your gut.
They split the bill. Everyone hugs too long. Andrea leaves muttering about lesbians and nostalgia. Jack offers to run background checks. Sam walks Lena to her car.
At the curb, Sam pauses.
“I’m not saying she’ll pick up,” she says. “But I think maybe you should just… risk it.”
Lena nods. She should.
*
The car is quiet except for the sound of her own breathing, which, despite her best efforts, has taken on that shallow, irregular pattern reserved for emergencies and ex-girlfriends. Lena grips the steering wheel like it might launch into orbit. She’s been sitting in the underground car park for six minutes, staring at the signal bars on her phone as if they’re divine omens.
Sam’s words echo, irritatingly calm: I think you maybe you should just risk it.
She should. She just doesn’t know what happens after that.
The contact is still there - Kara Danvers. Not K. Not Work. Not Don’t. Just Kara. Last seen: three weeks ago, when she shared a photo of a hotdog and called it ‘lunch for winners’. Lena had stared at it for twenty-three seconds longer than she should have.
She opens the call log. Her thumb hovers. Her brain, meanwhile, runs a psychological assault in five acts.
Ring 1 -
She’s changed her number. Of course she has. Four years is plenty of time. She’s probably with someone now. Some woman who builds houses and says things like ‘I’m not on social media’. Someone who doesn’t start fights when she feels vulnerable. Someone who doesn’t text aggressively neutral things like “Happy launch day. Good luck.” when she really means “Please still be mine.”
Ring 2 -
She’s going to think it’s an accident. Or worse, a relapse. She’ll see the name flash across the screen and get that sinking feeling people get when an old song comes on that they used to love but now associate with vomiting on a yacht. I should hang up. I should -
Ring 3 -
What if she’s with someone right now? What if she answers while driving to brunch with a girlfriend who’s a veterinarian-slash-potter, and I have to listen to her say “Sorry, it’s Lena” in that polite way that means ‘No longer relevant’? What if she doesn’t even remember the smile I’m talking about?
Ring 4 -
She used to hum when she typed. Used to leave voice notes instead of texts when she was too tired to spell. Used to press her thumb just below my sternum and say, ‘That’s where I keep you’. What if none of that meant what I thought it did? What if I hallucinated the whole relationship? What if I romanticized a fever dream and built six years of bad decisions on the back of a daydream?
Ring 5 -
Click.
The line connects.
Lena stops breathing. She forgets how to hold the phone. There’s a beat of static, not technical - emotional. And then -
“Hey darling.”
It’s not a question. Not an accusation. Just… familiar. Unrushed. Like they’d spoken yesterday. Like Lena isn’t calling out of nowhere after four years, six exes, and one nude that accidentally got her blocked for seventy-two hours.
Her heart flutters. Not poetically. Medically. It’s unpleasant and real and completely hers.
She opens her mouth to say something - anything - but nothing comes out. The words are there, queued like nervous passengers. I think I miss you and It’s always been you and You once called me the girl of your dreams and I need you to know I never moved on from that.
She says none of them.
Because Kara, impossibly, calls her darling. Softly. Like it’s a favourite song she didn’t realize she remembered.
The phone is warm in her hand, her pulse loud in her throat, and somewhere between the fifth ring and the word darling, Lena understands. Of course the first call I make is you.