Jane
The paperback rested open in Jane Witmen’s hands like a confession.
She sat alone at a corner table in Blackthorn Café, the kind of place that smelled permanently of scorched espresso and damp wool coats, where locals lingered too long because there was nowhere else to go. Rain freckled the front windows, blurring Main Street into soft gray streaks. Jane liked it that way—softened, obscured, easier to pretend she wasn’t entirely present.
The book’s cover was creased, the spine broken in a way that suggested it had been read more than once. A dark romance. She had chosen it deliberately, the way one chooses a wound just to see if it still hurts.
On the page, the heroine was being seen—understood in a way that felt invasive and intimate all at once. The man in the story did not ask permission to want her. He did not hesitate, did not forget, did not miss the meaning in the quiet spaces between words. He took up room in her life and expected her to rearrange herself around him.
Jane turned the page slowly.
Patrick had never rearranged anything for her.
The thought came uninvited, sharp and immediate. She tried to push it aside, but it settled anyway, heavy as a hand on her chest. Patrick rearranged schedules. Bills. Groceries. He rearranged their life the way one organizes a drawer—efficient, careful, utterly devoid of desire.
She read another paragraph. The heroine’s pulse quickened. Jane’s did too, but not for the same reasons. What she wanted wasn’t the dramatics, not the danger exactly—it was the certainty. The way the man in the book knew what he wanted and never doubted that wanting her was worth the damage.
Patrick wanted peace. Predictability. A wife who did not ask for more than he was prepared to give.
Jane closed the book halfway, her thumb marking the page. The café hummed around her—cups clinking, low voices, the hiss of steaming milk—but inside her head everything went quiet and tight. She imagined Patrick sitting across from her, nodding politely, asking if she needed more sugar. She imagined telling him what she wanted and watching confusion bloom across his face like a slow bruise.
He wouldn’t refuse her. He would misunderstand her.
That was worse.
Her phone buzzed against the table. A text from her mother: We’re here.
Jane didn’t look up right away. She reopened the book, reading the same sentence twice without absorbing it, clinging to the moment where no one expected anything from her.
“Jane.”
Her sister’s voice cut cleanly through the fog. Eleanor stood across from her now, coat already draped over the chair, eyes too observant for comfort. Margaret Witmen followed close behind, composed as always, handbag clutched like an extension of her spine.
Jane slid the book closed and set it face down.
“Sorry,” she said, forcing a smile as they sat. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Margaret’s gaze flicked immediately to the book, then away again, disapproval quiet but present. “You’re early,” she said. “Patrick didn’t come?”
There it was. Jane had known it would come. It always did.
“He’s working,” Jane replied. The lie slipped out smoothly; it had practice. “We’re meeting later.”
“For your anniversary,” Eleanor added, too brightly. “I still can’t believe it’s been seven years.”
Seven years. Jane pressed her fingers against the edge of the table, grounding herself in the grain of the wood. Seven years of shared calendars and muted conversations. Seven years of being loved in a way that felt more like maintenance than hunger.
Margaret smiled, the expression carrying a weight Jane had learned to read early. “Patrick is a good man,” she said, as if Jane might have forgotten. “Steady. Loyal. That matters more than people realize.”
Jane nodded. She had perfected the nod. It required no commitment, no confession.
“He’s planning something special, I’m sure,” Eleanor went on. “He always does. Remember last year? That restaurant by the river?”
Jane remembered. She remembered watching Patrick carefully cut his food while explaining the wine list to her. She remembered thanking him for the evening and meaning it in the way one means gratitude for a favor.
Her thoughts slid, unbidden, back to the book. To the way the heroine had been pulled into something sharp and consuming, something that did not ask her to be reasonable.
Jane wondered what it would feel like to be unreasonable.
Margaret leaned forward. “You should appreciate him,” she said gently, which somehow made it worse. “Men like Patrick don’t come along often.”
Jane’s gaze drifted to the rain-streaked window. Outside, a car passed too fast, tires hissing on wet pavement. She imagined movement. Impact. A life jolted out of its careful lane.
“I do,” she said, because it was easier than explaining the hollow place that lived beneath appreciation.
Her fingers twitched toward the book, aching to open it again, to sink back into a world where desire was not something you apologized for wanting.
Across the table, her mother and sister continued talking—about Patrick, about plans, about a future that felt increasingly pre-written.
Jane smiled when she was supposed to. She nodded when it was expected.
All the while, the story waited beneath her palm, dark and patient, reminding her of everything she had not yet allowed herself to need.
