Ruby opened the door on Tuesday with wet hair and the expression of somebody expecting a parcel she had decided she didn’t want.
“Come in.”
June followed her upstairs. Usually she stopped in the kitchen without asking. This time she kept her coat on until Ruby said, “You can hang that up.”
The drying rack held two shirts and a pair of tights. Ruby moved it to make room for June’s chair. It caught on a table leg. For a few seconds both of them fought with it, one lifting, one turning, exactly as they would have on any other evening.
When it was free, Ruby smiled automatically. June almost smiled back.
“Eli said you were never together,” she said.
Ruby let go of the rack. “We weren’t.”
“And that you paid him to play a part.”
“Yes.”
“You could have told me that yesterday.”
“You were already angry.”
“I still am.”
Ruby sat on the edge of the kitchen chair. She had brought out two mugs but hadn’t filled them. June took the other chair.
“Who were you protecting?”
Ruby ran her fingers into her wet hair, pulled it back, and let it fall.
“Sam.”
For a moment June thought she meant a different Sam. The thought wasn’t believable even while she had it.
“My Sam?”
“He isn’t yours now.”
June’s chair scraped as she shifted.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said quickly. “That was a horrible way to put it.”
“What happened?”
“We kissed.”
June looked at the empty mugs. One had a tiny painted bee on the inside. She had bought it for Ruby because Ruby once described a bee that followed them into a shop as a customer who knew what she wanted.
“When?”
“Seven weeks ago. After that night out. You were working.”
“Did anything happen while Sam and I were together?”
“No.” Ruby leaned forward. “No, June. It was one kiss, months after you’d split up. We didn’t have an affair. Nothing was going on behind your back when you were with him.”
June pressed her palms flat against her thighs.
“And after the kiss?”
“He stopped. Then he said he didn’t want anything. We didn’t start seeing each other.”
“Were you sleeping together?”
“No. That was it. I wish I could tell you it was nothing to me too.”
Ruby looked toward the window. There was a towel over the bottom of it where rain sometimes came through.
June had seen Sam twice since their breakup. Once, across the street, they had both pretended to look somewhere else. Once, in a supermarket, they had spoken kindly about a loaf of bread. She had been proud that she had managed the bread. Now she had no idea what it had meant to him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to. Then he didn’t want me and it seemed worse. Hurting you for something I didn’t even get to have.”
“You decided I would rather watch you cry about him on my phone.”
“I didn’t say his name.”
“You made up another man.”
Ruby got up. She went to the kettle, then stopped beside it with one hand on the handle.
“I felt stupid,” she said. “I really liked him. I know you don’t want to hear that.”
June didn’t. She wanted Ruby to have mistaken politeness for love so that none of this belonged to anybody. Instead Ruby was wiping the back of her wrist under her nose, annoyed with herself for needing to.
“He’d been nice to me,” Ruby continued. “At things, afterwards. We talked. He asked about auditions. He remembered when they were. I thought—well. Then there was the kiss and suddenly I’d got it wrong.”
“Did he know you liked him before that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t walk around announcing it.”
“You’ve announced quite a lot now.”
Ruby flinched. June was glad for half a second and then wasn’t.
“The hurt in the video is from that?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s what happened with Sam. I changed the things that would point to him.”
“It wasn’t a breakup.”
“It felt like losing something.”
“But you described dinners. And things he owned at your house.”
“That was how I told it.”
June stood and went to the window. The dry cleaner downstairs had a row of garment bags hanging so low they hid most of the pavement. She could see people’s ankles passing beneath them.
Sam remembering an audition was painfully believable. He could be thoughtful that way. Early on, he had remembered the films June wanted to see and checked afterwards to ask whether she’d liked them. She had kept measuring the later months against the beginning.
“And my words?” she asked.
“I borrowed them because they fit. Because you’d said what I couldn’t seem to say.”
June turned.
“Did you give him what I wrote?”
“Sam?”
“Eli. Did he see my private pages?”
“No.”
“Did you use my whole story to make this?”
“No. I used a few things you said. The story came from what happened to me. I should have asked about the words, and I’m sorry.”
June watched her. She had answers now. She hated them, but she could see how one awful choice had led to another: Sam, then the invented relationship, then Eli being paid to make the invented man visible. Her own words borrowed to say the hurt Ruby had been hiding.
That was something a person could do. It was something Ruby could do.
“You have to say Eli wasn’t your boyfriend,” June said.
“Then people will ask who was.”
“Nobody was. You can say you dramatized something.”
“And then it becomes a whole thing about whether I deserved to feel it.”
“He doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him.”
“He knew what we were doing.”
“He says you promised to clarify it if people targeted him.”
Ruby turned the kettle on. The noise filled the little room.
“I need a minute to work out how,” she said.
“You’ve had two days.”
“Two days in which people have been kinder to me than they’ve been in years. Do you understand how hard it is to take that and tell them they misunderstood?”
June could hear the little crack in her voice. She had sat beside Ruby after enough auditions to know what those years had felt like. It didn’t make her want to say yes.
“They didn’t misunderstand,” she said. “You told them something else.”
Ruby took the kettle off its base before it finished boiling.
“Would you tell everyone it was Sam?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m not going to post his name tonight, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It is.”
“That isn’t an agreement to protect the video.”
Ruby poured the water. She had forgotten the tea bags. June watched it steam in the empty mugs until Ruby noticed and gave a short, helpless laugh.
“I can’t do anything properly today.”
June reached toward the tea tin, then drew her hand back. Ruby opened it herself.
“I should go,” June said.
“I’ve made you tea.”
“Not yet.”
Ruby looked at the two mugs. “June.”
She stayed for the next words. Ruby didn’t seem to find them.
June took down her coat. At the door, Ruby said, “I didn’t stop being your friend because this happened.”
“I know.”
It came out more gently than she intended. That was part of what made going down the stairs so hard.