Adam calls her

Adam called Lana the next afternoon.

He does it from the kitchen with the phone on speaker, because Mia asked and then immediately looked like she regretted asking. She sits on a stool, cup between her hands, and listens to it ring.

Lana picks up mid-breath, like she had the phone already in her hand.

“Adam? Hi. That’s—wow. Okay.”

“Hey.”

“Are you dying, or did you pocket-dial me?”

“Neither. Are you around today?”

“Depends why.”

He glances at Mia. She gives him the smallest nod.

“Coffee,” he says. “If you have an hour. I thought you should meet Mia.”

The line goes quiet in that particular way people go quiet when they are rearranging their face.

“Your wife.”

“Yeah.”

Lana lets out a little sound that could be a laugh. “You waited two months into a marriage to spring the ex on her? Bold.”

“It was her idea.”

Another pause. Softer. “Oh. Then… yeah. I can do an hour. Same place on 12th?”

“If that’s still yours.”

“It is. Don’t be late. I hate sitting alone looking like I’ve been stood up by my past.”

He hangs up. Mia stares at the dark screen.

“She sounded like herself,” she says.

“She is herself. That’s the whole reason this works.”

They get there first. Corner table, too much afternoon light, a cafe loud enough that a private sentence can hide in it. Mia keeps watching the door and pretending she is watching the street.

Lana is on time. Hair down, mouth sharp, a coat she shrugs off like she has never been nervous in her life. She sees Adam and the smile hits before she can edit it. Then she finds Mia and puts her hand out, warm, direct.

“Mia. God, you’re pretty. I don’t know why I thought I should lead with that, but here we are.”

Mia laughs, surprised into it. “I’ll take it. Hi.”

They sit. For a while it is just coffee. How the neighborhood changed. The bakery that used to be next door. Adam’s job, which Lana already half-knows and only needs filled in. Mia answers when she is spoken to and lets the two of them have the easy rhythm leftover from knowing each other. It does not sting the way she thought it would. It sits in her chest differently. Familiar. Useful.

Lana asks how married life is treating them, then winces.

“That sounded like a greeting card. Ignore me. I meant, are you surviving the first stretch, or is it still all new furniture and people asking when you’re having a party.”

“Two months,” Mia says. “So… new furniture. No party.”

“Good. Parties are where everybody stares at the marriage like it’s a science project.” Lana glances at Adam. “You look settled. That’s new.”

“I am,” he says, and leaves it there.

Mia talks a little about work. Lana talks about a roommate who burns toast at midnight. Adam tells the story about the old apartment’s water pressure and Lana covers her face.

“I forgot about that. That shower was a hate crime.”

They laugh. The table loosens. Lana stops sitting like she is ready to leave. Adam’s hand finds the back of Mia’s chair and stays, not claiming, just there. Twenty minutes go by in pieces. Ordinary ones.

Then Lana turns her cup in a slow circle and looks at them both.

“Okay. I have to say it or I’m going to keep waiting for the other shoe. Why today? We were fine. You didn’t owe me a meet-the-wife. Especially not this soon.”

Adam looks at Mia.

Mia’s thumb tracks the handle of her cup. She had practiced a clean version of this and now none of it feels clean.

“I asked him to call you,” she says. “Not because I needed proof of anything. I just… didn’t want to say this to a stranger first.”

Lana’s smile fades into something more careful. “Say what.”

Adam does not rescue her. He drinks, eyes down, and lets his wife find the words.

Mia keeps her voice low enough that it belongs only to the table.

“There is something I want. From him. From us. And it involves another person being there, not in the abstract. In the room.” She swallows. “I asked him if he would be with someone else. Not secretly. Not as a slip. With me there. Watching.”

Lana goes very still.

A spoon hits a saucer somewhere behind them. The door opens. Nobody at their table moves.

Lana looks at Adam. He meets it and nods, once, like he has already done the argument at home and does not need to do it again here.

She looks back at Mia.

“You want to watch him with other women.”

Mia’s mouth is dry. “Yes. And I wanted you to hear it from me.”