Marvin’s POV
I almost don't go into the café.
I stand on the sidewalk with my hand on the door, debating whether I actually need coffee or just need distraction from the restlessness that's been living in my chest since Violet walked away three months ago. The afternoon sun cuts sharp angles across the pavement, and I watch my reflection in the glass—a man who used to know exactly what he wanted and now can't remember why any of it mattered.
I go in anyway. Because the alternative is walking back to my apartment and sitting with thoughts I've been trying to outrun since she told me there was no one else and I believed her.
The café is half-empty, the post-lunch lull that makes every conversation audible. I'm scanning the menu board when movement catches my peripheral vision—a woman leaning forward across a corner table, her whole body angled toward someone with an intimacy that makes my chest tighten before I even register who I'm looking at.
Violet.
And she's not alone.
The man across from her is older, polished, carrying himself with the particular authority of someone who commands rooms without trying. Dark hair threaded with silver at the temples.
Expensive clothes that fit like they were made for his body specifically. I recognize the body language before I fully process his face—the way he watches her, the way she's watching him back—and I understand with sudden, devastating clarity that this is not friendship.
This is history.
This is the ghost I was always competing against, and he's sitting across from the woman I loved in a café where anyone could see them.
Then his face clicks into place, and my stomach drops through the floor.
The bookstore. Months ago. Violet's careful introduction and my certainty that something was wrong, something she wasn't telling me. This is Zachary, someone from my life in New York. The way he'd looked at her even then—wounded and wanting—and I'd filed it away as paranoia because I wanted to believe her when she said there was no one else.
I wasn't paranoid. I was right.
Violet's hand reaches across the table, and I watch her fingers intertwine with his. Watch her smile at him with an openness she never once showed me—not at the formal, not in private, not in any of the moments I tried to coax her out of whatever shell she kept retreating into. I thought the problem was her. Thought she just needed time, needed patience, needed me to love her carefully enough that she'd eventually unfold.
The problem was never her.
The problem was that she was already in love with someone else and didn't have the courage to tell me.
I don't cause a scene. Don't cross the room and demand explanations I already understand. Don't give either of them the satisfaction of knowing they broke something in me that might not heal correctly.
I just turn and leave before they notice me, carrying the image like a wound that won't stop bleeding.
The walk back to my apartment takes forever. Every block stretches into something infinite, and I replay every moment with Violet like I'm looking for evidence I should have seen sooner.
Every kiss she rationed out like currency she couldn't afford to spend. Every public appearance she refused, every invitation to meet my friends she deflected, every time I suggested something that would make us visible and watched her flinch like I'd asked her to walk through fire.
Every time she held me at distance while promising it wasn't about someone else.
She lied. Or maybe she didn't lie—maybe she just withheld truth in ways that feel exactly the same when you're the one left standing in the wreckage.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out without thinking. Sophia's name glows on the screen, accompanied by a message that's warm and uncomplicated and everything Violet never was.
Hey! Just saw your text from yesterday. I'd love to grab dinner sometime. Let me know when works for you :)
Sophia. The girl from my economics seminar who's been orbiting my attention for weeks with the particular patience of someone who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to pursue it.
She laughs at my jokes without analyzing them first. She touches my arm when we talk like touching me is the most natural thing in the world. She looks at me in public like she's proud to be seen standing next to me.
Everything Violet couldn't do. Everything Violet was too busy loving someone else to even try.
I don't love Sophia. I know that with the same certainty I know the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow. Pursuing her now would be using her to fill a wound Violet created, and that's not fair to either of us.
But the alternative is walking into my empty apartment and sitting alone with a heartbreak I don't know how to survive.
I type a response before I can talk myself out of it.
How about Friday? There's a new Italian place downtown I've been wanting to try.
Her reply comes within seconds—enthusiastic, eager, already suggesting outfit options and asking what time works best. The attention feels like sunlight after months of standing in Violet's shadow, and I let myself lean into it even though I know I shouldn't.
Maybe devotion can be learned. Maybe I can convince myself to feel something real for someone who actually wants me back, who isn't carrying another man in her chest like a secret she's ashamed of. Maybe this is just what moving on looks like—messy and imperfect and not entirely honest about its own motivations.
Some part of me knows I'm wrong. Knows that using Sophia to cauterize a wound will only create new damage I'll have to answer for later.
The rest of me is too broken to care.
I pocket my phone and keep walking, and somewhere behind me in a café I'll never visit again, Violet is holding the hand of a man she chose over me without ever giving me the chance to compete fairly.
I hope she's happy. I hope he gives her whatever it was I couldn't.
And I hope, someday, I stop meaning it when I say I still wish it had been me.