My Boyfriend Left Me Sick to Comfort His First Love

The lilies were the first thing wrong.

I noticed them before I was fully awake — a fat white bouquet propped against the water glass on my nightstand, petals so perfect they looked fake. Braylon was already up, moving around the kitchen with unusual purpose, and the smell reached me before the meaning did: sweet and dense and just slightly too much, the way perfume is too much when someone is trying to cover something else.

I sat up slowly. Outside the window, Los Angeles was already cooking. It wasn't yet eight in the morning and the sky had that flat, punished white of a day that would hit ninety-nine by noon. The ceiling fan circled without conviction. My body had started its monthly negotiations overnight — a low, warning throb deep in my abdomen that I recognized the way you recognize bad weather before it arrives.

I pressed my fingertips together in my lap and watched the door.

Braylon came in carrying a tray. Eggs, toast, a glass of juice with actual ice in it. He was smiling in that careful way, the way you smile when you've rehearsed it.

"Morning," he said, setting the tray across my legs with a precision that felt rehearsed too. "Figured you could use a slow start."

Four years. I knew this man's rhythms the way I knew my own — the way he took his coffee, the specific silence he kept when he was avoiding something, the version of generous he performed when guilt was eating him from the inside out. Braylon did not make breakfast on weekday mornings. Braylon had not brought me flowers since our second anniversary.

"Thank you," I said.

He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his phone from the nightstand in a single, practiced motion, setting it face-down against his thigh before I could see the screen. Casual. Automatic. The kind of move a person makes when they've stopped thinking about whether it looks like anything.

I picked up my fork. I ate the eggs. I smiled when he told me I should take it easy today.

The cramps came on harder by mid-morning. By the time Braylon retreated to the bathroom for his shower, I was already curling inward, that deep, grinding pressure radiating down my thighs and up my spine in slow, deliberate waves. The AC unit worked but didn't work — it pushed air around without really cooling it, and the apartment sat in the full blaze of the south-facing windows like a held breath.

I was lying on my side on top of the covers when his phone lit up.

I didn't mean to look. Or maybe I did. Somewhere in the four years of small, ignored instincts, something had been keeping a tab.

The screen showed three messages in quick succession. The name at the top read: Felicity.

*I'm back in LA.*

*I need to see you, B.*

*No one understands me like you do.*

The shower was