There was a time she’d been really good at this.

Instead, she wanted to be ironing out the kinks in the redone report. Brainstorming with Cora.

Cora, who wanted to help.

Lauren laughed and brushed her fingers over Frazer’s hands. The touch was light, relaxed and filled with meaning. This could be very, very easy.

Turning her attention to the woman in front of her, Frazer made herself forget everything else.

* * *

On the steps out the front of her best friend’s house, Cora tried to remember to breathe. Her heart was thrumming against her ribs, her hands clammy. She hated arguments. She hated how words twisted in on themselves, became ugly and harsh. In the past, she’d been cowed by confrontations like that, but Alec had always pushed them, and these days, she found herself hurling back at him almost as she good as she got, regret thick on her tongue as soon as the words tumbled out. Things she didn’t even know went through her head spewed past her lips, falling heavily over the kitchen tile like stones Alec could later sift through at his leisure and throw at her another day.

And he always did.

With her fingers gripping her knees, she bounced on her toes, agitated. Why did Lisa have to be out today? Cora had to remind herself to not be selfish—there could have been another emergency with Lisa’s mother’s health. Cora didn’t know how Lisa supported her mother as well as her younger siblings, frankly.

So she was selfish. But Cora really, really needed a glass of wine with her best friend right at that moment. If this was any other day, she’d lean back on Lisa’s couch, the wine washing over her tongue like a balm, and it would eventually get better, or at least not-so-awful. Lisa, the master of Cora’s complicated thoughts, would artfully pull the story from her and nod sympathetically, filling up her glass until Cora grew sick of her own voice. And then Cora would be calm enough to face home again.

Not tonight, though. And Lisa had to be out on the night she had stormed dramatically from the house, her cheeks flaming in the cool night air. The night she’d watched Alec throw a glass that shattered against the wall over her head, dangerously close. The air between them had grown palpable, pulsing with harsh emotion—his anger and the flames of her own that had licked up in response. It worked well to cover the resentment that had been settling low in her stomach the last few years, bubbling yet never surfacing.

His wide, pale eyes had stared at her, strangely illuminated in the fluorescent light. She turned on her heel and fled.

Naturally, she went to Lisa’s.

Naturally, Lisa wasn’t home.

In front of Lisa’s doorway, she made the decision: she wasn’t going back home. There was no way she was getting back in that bed, to lie with metres of space between her and the husband that had once clung to her. To the ominous silence that hung around the house like something putrid.