The Name She Shouldn't Know

The words were out before I could stop them, and the kitchen went very quiet.

"Dante—" I said, and then my hand flew to my mouth as if I could shove the name back in.

William had been reaching for the olive oil. He stopped with his fingers an inch from the bottle and turned, slowly, the way a man turns when he has heard a gun cock somewhere behind him.

"What did you call me?"

"Nothing. I said—I meant—I was talking to the pan."

"The pan is called Dante."

"It's a very Italian pan."

He didn't smile. That was the worst of it. He just looked at me, those grey eyes going through me like a searchlight, and I stood there with a wooden spoon dripping tomato sauce onto the flagstones and understood, with a lurch, exactly how much trouble I was in.

I had told exactly one person the truth about the sea-house with the windows facing the ocean and nothing but grass in the yard. One person knew about the piano piece I played when I couldn't sleep, the one I'd never named for anyone else. One person had heard me say, at half past two in the morning, that I typed instead of slept because the dark was too loud. And that person was standing three metres away in his shirtsleeves, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a tea towel over one shoulder — though he knew all of it only from a girl called Luna, a girl who had never existed.

*Get a grip, Nikki.* I turned back to the pan. "It's the wine. You put too much in the ragù."

"You haven't touched the wine."

"Then it's the altitude."

"We're on the ground floor."

I stirred the sauce with more violence than it deserved. Three days. I'd been inside this house for three days since the dinner, since the confession I still couldn't properly remember making, since he'd pressed the back of his hand to my forehead and told me to bring my fever down before I picked a fight. Sophia had gone back to campus for a lecture series. The house had shrunk around me until it was just corridors and the smell of beeswax and him, and now I'd gone and called him by the name I'd only ever typed.

"Nicole." His voice had dropped. "Look at me."

"I'm busy."

"Nicole."

I looked. He was closer than I'd thought. He reached past me — I flinched, which was embarrassing — and turned the hob down, because the sauce was catching. Then he took the spoon out of my hand and set it on the rest, and I stood there feeling like a girl who had been caught climbing out of a window.

"You've been jumpy since breakfast," he said. "You flinch when I come into a room. You called me a name I've never told you." A pause. "I'm not going to interrogate you over a pan of ragù. But I'd like you to stop looking at me like I'm about to hurt you."

"I don't—"

"You do."

The doorbell saved me. Then it saved me again, because when I opened the door it was Tyler, hands in his jacket pockets, hair damp from the drizzle, looking at me the way he always did — as if I were a door he'd been knocking on for years and couldn't work out why it never opened.

"I saw your car last night," he said. "The Duca place. I was driving past, I do that sometimes, don't make it weird."

"Tyler—"

"I know." He held up both hands. "I know what I said at the party. I know about Jess. I'm not here to—" He stopped, rubbed the back of his neck. "You're still my best friend, Nikki. That doesn't switch off because I've got a girlfriend. It's not a tap."

Behind me, William had appeared in the hall, silent as a shadow, and Tyler's eyes flicked to him and something in his jaw tightened.

"Mr. Duca."

"Tyler."

The temperature dropped about ten degrees. I grabbed my coat off the hook before either of them could say anything else, because I have survived twenty-one years on this earth largely by moving fast.

We went to the market. William drove — he insisted, in that flat way that wasn't a suggestion — and Tyler watched us go from the doorstep with his hands still in his pockets. The market was a covered one in the old quarter, iron girders and glass, fishmongers shouting in three languages, a cheese stall that smelled like a cathedral. I bought lemons and basil and let the noise wash over me.

"Two?" said the fishmonger, holding up a pair of sea bass, grinning at us. "For you and the signora?"

I opened my mouth to say *we're not*—

"Yes," William said.

Just that. Yes. He paid, took the paper parcel, and walked on as if he'd said nothing at all, while I stood rooted to the wet flagstones with my heart going like a bird in a box. He'd said yes. To a stranger. Without blinking. As though it were the most ordinary fact in the world, as though it cost him nothing, as though it were *true*.

"William."

"Hm."

"You told him we were—"

"I did."

"Why?"

He shifted the parcel to his other arm and looked down at me, and for a moment the mask slipped — not into coldness, but into something softer and far more dangerous. "Because we were standing together, buying fish, and he asked a question, and I answered it honestly." A beat. "Is that a problem?"

I couldn't find a single word. So I walked, and he walked beside me, and the whole way home I could feel the shape of the lie I'd built around myself starting to crack along its seams.

Back in the kitchen, I cooked. He chopped. We didn't talk about the fishmonger. We talked about Sophia's lectures, about the surf club suspension, about whether basil should go in at the start or the end, and it was so easy, so horribly easy, that I forgot for whole minutes at a time who I was supposed to be.

Then I passed him the salt and said, "Here, Dante," again — casual, thoughtless, the way you'd say a name you'd said a thousand times — and the knife stopped moving.

He set it down. He wiped his hands on the towel very slowly, and when he spoke his voice was quiet and level and it went through me like a blade.

"Dante," he said, "is the name a girl called Luna gave me. Nobody else on this earth has ever used it." He turned. "So I'll ask you once, Nicole, and I want you to think carefully before you answer. How do you know it?"

The sauce bubbled. The rain ticked against the window. And I stood in the kitchen of the man I had promised myself I would never lie to again, and felt both my worlds come down on me at once, and had absolutely nowhere left to run.

*Is Tyler overstepping by turning up at her door when he's got a girlfriend — or is Nicole the one in the wrong for keeping him close?*