Outside, somewhere below our window, a scooter passed through the empty street with a thin metallic whine.
Lucie listened to that sound as if it gave her time to breathe.
Then she looked away from me and reached again for her belly.
“I saw your face,” she said. “Before you touched me. I saw what you thought.”
I wanted to deny it.
I wanted to say no, never, impossible, that fear had confused me for only a second.
But the truth stood between us with the towel on the floor and the backward nightgown.
“I don’t know what I thought,” I whispered.
It was not enough.
We both knew it.
She closed her eyes, and for a moment her breathing became shallow and uneven.
I helped her into a coat over the nightgown, careful not to look at the stains anymore.
The backward seams showed beneath the collar, small and absurd, like proof of how helpless the night had been.
She noticed my gaze and answered before I asked.
“I put it on after the shower,” she said. “I was dizzy. I couldn’t tell front from back.”
The explanation was so simple that it became unbearable.
No secret lover.
No hurried departure.
