Five and a half years ago.
In Aurora's opinion, the Vance living room at nine-forty on a Wednesday evening was too warm. She had said so twice.
Eric had reached for the thermostat the second time without answering. The air hadn't changed, and he had sat back down on the sofa opposite her with the slow deliberation of a man managing something internal.
"The numbers from Zurich are worse than we thought," Aurora said, keeping her voice even. "Three of our midsize clients have pulled their quarterly commitments. One of them mentioned, unprompted, that they'd seen our internal pricing model."
"They shouldn't have seen our internal pricing model."
"But they did. Which means someone with access is…" She stopped.
Eric went pale: the grey, shallow pale of a man whose body had started arguing with him about staying upright.
"Go on."
"You're the color of my tablecloth."
"I'm fine."
"Eric, your eyes are…"
"Keep going, Aurora. The pricing model."
She glanced at his forehead. A faint sheen. He had not touched the water on the table. He had not touched the tea his wife had made either.
She noted this and kept talking. "The pricing model was in three places. Your office server, my office server, and a legal brief with our outside counsel. One of those three leaked. I can tell you it wasn't mine."
"Noted."
"Eric, I need you to drink some water."
"I'm fine."
He wasn't fine.
He shifted forward to reach for the glass and stopped halfway, one hand flat on his thigh, the other pressed against the arm of the sofa. His breath had gone shallow. He was sitting very still, in the way people sat very still when the room was moving without permission.
Aurora stood and crossed the small distance between their armchairs and sat on the sofa beside him.
She placed one hand lightly on his knee—the way she would have done at sixteen, at twelve, because Eric was the oldest friend she had and he was about to pass out.
Her hand on his knee was not romance. It was don't fall.
"Eric. Breathe."
"I am breathing."
"Breathe deeper."
He did: slow, controlled. Aurora counted four seconds in, four out, four in. His color did not return, but it stopped leaving.
"When did you last eat?" she asked.
"Lunch."
"Of what day?"
"Today."
"Eric. Of what day?"
He didn't answer. She was about to push for a real answer when she saw it—a thread of dark movement at the line of his collar. Small. Crawling.
A spider. An ordinary household spider. It had emerged from somewhere inside his collar and was making an unsteady journey up the side of his neck.
Eric couldn't see it. He was looking at the floor. Aurora considered, for one half second, whether to mention it. Decided not to.
She lifted her free hand, leaned in, and carefully, without commentary, flicked the spider off his collar and onto the sofa cushion, where it scurried off into the upholstery and vanished.
Eric had watched her hand move. He hadn’t understood what she was doing. He straightened slightly to see what she was looking at.
"Aurora, what…"
"Spider."
"A spider?"
"In your collar."
"On my… shit."
"Yes."
Eric stared at her, she stared back. And then, because the evening had been too long and the air was too close and there had just been a spider on his neck, they both laughed.
The kind of absurd, startled laugh that happened between two people who had known each other too long to pretend life was dignified.
Her hand was still on his knee. His head was still angled toward hers. The space between their faces was, from the sofa, measurable in inches.
From the doorway, Aurora would later understand, it had been measurable in something else entirely. She didn't see Estelle. She saw nothing but Eric's pale face finding its color again.
She didn’t, at any point, see the woman standing in the doorway with a tea tray.
***
Present.
The note arrived at Sterling Keep on a Tuesday at 10:14 a.m. Hand-delivered. Cream envelope.
Isla read it first, because Isla read everything first.
"From Aurora," she said, setting it on Estelle's desk. "She wants a meeting."
Estelle didn't pick it up. "No."
"Stel."
"No."
"Stel, listen to me."
"I'm not having coffee with the woman whose hand was on my ex-husband's knee or even in his pants, Isla."
"Which is exactly why you're having coffee with her. She has information. You don't. At minimum, you come home knowing what she knows.”
Estelle looked at the envelope for a long moment.
"Pick the location," she said finally. "Somewhere I'd never go."
The café Isla picked was a quiet tearoom in a neighborhood full of young mothers and freelance designers. Estelle arrived at eleven. Aurora was already there, at a corner table, a small teapot between her hands.
She stood when Estelle approached. She didn't extend a hand. "Thank you for coming."
"I almost didn't."
"I'd have understood."
They sat. A server came. Estelle ordered an Earl Grey. Aurora was already drinking something green and aggressively healthy.
The first minute was silence. The second minute was silence. By the third, Aurora had put her teacup down.
"I didn't ask you here to explain," she said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not here to defend myself, and I'm not here to defend Eric. I don't think either of those is my place."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because I want to tell you what I know. And then I want to leave."
Estelle folded her hands on the table. "Alright. Go."
Aurora looked at her steadily. "I know what it looked like." A small pause. "And I know what Clarice wanted it to look like."
The air in the room changed immediately. Estelle kept her face still. She had trained for this for years. "Care to explain?"
"The partnership, the business proposal, the meeting at your house. None of that was my initiative. Clarice arranged the introduction through my father."
Aurora's voice was low, even.
"She told my father my firm and Eric's had complementary portfolios, and she asked if I'd consider opening a conversation. I said yes, because my father asked. I didn't know, at the time, that she had also told Eric the same thing from the other direction."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning we were both told, independently, that the other party was interested. Meaning we had both already been set up to find the meeting plausible. Clarice built a stage for us and let us walk onto it without telling us it was a stage."
"Why?"
Aurora didn’t flinch. "I think you know why."
Estelle did know, but didn't say so.
"The night." Aurora continued. "The night you saw us. The meeting in the living room."
"Don't."
"Estelle."
"I don't want the scene described to me, Aurora."
"You won't get the scene described to you. I'm not here to narrate it, I'm here to tell you one thing. Eric was about to pass out. My hand was on his knee because he was grey and shallow-breathing and I thought he was going to hit the floor. What you saw, from where you were standing, was not what was happening."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"No."
Estelle looked up, trying to detect the lie.
"I don't expect anything," Aurora continued. "I'm just telling you. What you do with it is up to you."
Estelle stared at her. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The café noise—small spoons, small laughter, the scrape of a chair two tables over—went on around them.
"Why now?" Estelle said finally. "Why tell me now?"
"Because I didn't know you were alive until two months ago. And because I've been married for seven years to a good man, and I know what it costs when someone lies about the version of you you're being accused of. I spent my twenties running away from someone else's version of me. I'm not interested in being anyone else's again."
When Estelle didn't answer, Aurora let the silence sit. When enough silence had passed, she pushed a small folded piece of paper across the table. Her number.
"If you ever want to talk again. No one else needs to know."
She stood, laid cash for both teas on the table. And left.
Estelle sat at the corner table for twenty minutes after she was gone. She never drank her Earl Grey.