Chapter 2 · The Office Cake

The studio she shared was on the third floor of an old textile mill that had been converted, fifteen years ago, into a warren of small businesses — a letterpress, a violin maker, two graphic design firms, and Hartwood & Marin, the children's-book illustration studio Ellie had started with her friend Sam when they were both still young enough to believe that starting a business with a friend was a romantic idea. They had survived. They had even, in some years, thrived. There were six of them now: Sam, Ellie, two junior illustrators, an art director, and a woman named Pavlina who did the books and the coffee and, on rare and sacred occasions, the cake.

It was Pavlina's birthday.

"Get in here, Marin," Sam said, leaning out of the conference room. "She made the lemon one."

Pavlina was sixty-one and Bulgarian and made a lemon cake with three layers, butter the color of saffron, and a glaze so thin it lay on the cake like rain. She made it twice a year — for her own birthday and for Christmas — and it had become, in the studio's small mythology, an event one did not skip. Ellie had been sitting at her desk pretending to redraw Mister Fox's tail. Her stomach hurt. Her head ached. She had not eaten lunch.

She thought, I will eat one slice. A small one.

She walked into the conference room. The cake was on the long oak table, cut into wedges, and Pavlina, beaming, was already lifting plates. The air was citrus and butter and the faint vanilla of warm sugar, and something in Ellie's body — something old, something not entirely hers — leaned forward toward the smell the way an animal leans toward water.

"Two pieces," Pavlina said firmly, when Ellie took her plate.

"One is plenty, Pav."

"Two. You are too thin."

This was not true, and Ellie was not too thin, and Pavlina knew it; it was the kindest thing Pavlina knew how to say to a woman who had been visibly tired for months. You are too thin. You should eat. Let me feed you. It was the language of a grandmother. Ellie took two pieces. She kissed Pavlina on the cheek and felt, beneath her own jaw, the small swelling she had begun to feel in the mornings — the soft, patient puffiness she had explained to herself as I am not drinking enough water.

She ate the first slice quickly, standing up, between Sam telling a story about his husband's terrible parallel parking and Pavlina pouring sparkling water into plastic cups. The first slice did what cake does: it dropped a small, bright stone of pleasure into the well of her morning. She closed her eyes for half a second. She did not even mean to.

She ate the second slice slowly. It was the second slice she remembered later.

The afternoon was ordinary in the way that afternoons in a working studio are ordinary. Sam reviewed sketches. The junior illustrators argued politely about a chicken's beak. Ellie redrew Mister Fox's tail and got it right on the third try, and when she stood up to take the new painting to the scanner, she felt — distinctly — a wave of nausea she could not, this time, dismiss.

She sat back down.

"You all right, Marin?" Sam said, without looking up.

"Cake hangover."

"Pav's cake will do that."

Ellie laughed. The nausea passed. She scanned the painting. She drove home in early-evening traffic, her right hand resting, without her noticing, against the small ache beneath her right rib. She picked Sophie up from after-school care. She made a dinner of pasta and jarred sauce and a bag of pre-cut salad, and she ate, again, more than she meant to, and afterward she lay on the couch while Sophie did homework at the kitchen table.

Her phone buzzed.

LINH: how was Pav's cake

ELLIE: legendary

LINH: still on for Saturday yoga

ELLIE: you keep asking and I keep dodging

LINH: yes I do and yes you do

LINH: come on, Marin

LINH: 9am, beginner class, no judgment

ELLIE: I'm fine, Linh, I just don't have time

There was a pause. Three little dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

LINH: I love you. I'm not asking because of your body. I'm asking because you sound tired in your texts.

Ellie looked at this message for a long time. Sophie was humming at the kitchen table, drawing a whale on the back of her math worksheet. The light over the stove was on, and the rest of the apartment was dim, and somewhere in the building above, someone was playing a piano scale, slowly, the way a child plays it.

ELLIE: ok

ELLIE: 9am

LINH: 🐢

LINH: that's you. slow but coming.

Ellie put the phone down. She lay on the couch and watched the ceiling.

At ten-thirty, when Sophie was asleep, Ellie woke from a doze on the couch with her right side burning. Not aching now — burning. A small, hot pulse beneath her ribs, as if something inside her were knocking on a door she had been pretending not to hear. She sat up. She breathed carefully. She got up and walked to the kitchen and drank a glass of water, and then another, and slowly the burn receded into the dull, familiar ache.

She stood in the kitchen for a long time, in the dark, with her hand on her side.

She thought of her father, who had died twelve years before of what the death certificate called complications related to chronic alcohol use and what her mother had always called, defensively, a heart attack. Her father had never gone to the doctor. Her father had eaten three meals a day at the diner and drunk a six-pack of beer with each of them and called the soft swelling of his belly good Italian living. Her father had been forty-nine when he died.

Ellie was thirty-nine.

She drank a third glass of water. She told herself that the burn under her ribs was the cake, the cake, only the cake.

In bed, in the dark, she did something she had not done in a long time. She put her hand on her own abdomen, gently, the way she would put her hand on Sophie's forehead to check for fever. She held it there.

I'm sorry, she thought, before she knew she was thinking it. She did not know to what. She fell asleep with her hand still in place, the heat of her own palm a small, uncertain apology to a body she had forgotten she was supposed to love.