A Kiss For Three

chapter 20

This morning tasted like burnt coffee and bad sleep. I brought both to Daniel.

We took the corner table at a diner that didn’t mind us camping with laptops and secrets. The windows fogged at the edges; the bell over the door kept announcing civilians. I slid my phone across: the photo from last night—me beside the painting of myself, my face mirroring brushstrokes I hadn’t consented to. He scanned it once, his expression tightening just a hair, then started typing—fast, methodical, already somewhere inside the wires.

“So, he painted you. Romantic, isn’t it?”

“You just had to know everything, didn’t you?” I kept my tone flat.

“Nope,” he said, smirking. “I’m just wondering about the other guy, the one that I saw, too.”

I stopped highlighting a line of emails that would ruin a hedge-fund manager by Friday. I looked up. He met my stare like a cat met gravity.

“I thought you like him,” he added, casual as a grenade.

“I do.”

“And the other one?”

Silence spilled between us; I let it sit there a second too long.

“Oh,” Daniel said, one eyebrow hiking. “You like them both.”

I pressed my thumb to the rim of the coffee cup until it hurt. “I don’t know, Daniel. They were… too good, you know. They were supportive, caring, kind, always there for me, funny, peaceful. It felt too good to be true. I felt like I was poking a birthday-present wrap, trying to figure out if there was a bomb inside.”

He snickered. “If there is, it’s double—best friends bundle.” He leaned back, chair squeaking. “You should relax. As long as you’re happy, it’s good for you.”

“I couldn’t relax.” I flipped a page and didn’t read it. “Not since they were everything my head wouldn’t shut up about.”

He studied me over his mug, something gentler shading his eyes. “Sometimes the bomb is confetti.”

“Confetti still explodes.”

“And you still dance in it.” He shrugged and turned back to the screen. “Okay, shut up and let me work magic.”

We lapsed into the kind of quiet only shared purpose could afford. I clocked a cheating husband at the SoHo House on three separate nights; Daniel tunneled through packet captures with the patience of a monk. The diner refilled our coffee like penance. I watched the door like it owed me news.

Forty minutes stretched; sixty frayed. Outside the glass, the city brightened into a liar. Then Daniel’s fingers slowed—he stopped; the absence of typing was loud. He didn’t look at me right away. When he did, his voice had that careful edge I hated. “Got your blackmailer. You’re not gonna believe it, though.”

My chair scraped back. My pulse spiked. “Who?”

He rotated the laptop toward me.

Camille.

Camille’s press photo stared out—glossed lips, perfect posture, a smile that had never learned how to warm. I went colder than the table. “No.”

“Wives, Iris,” he said, sighing. “They can get pretty crazy, can’t they?”

“No, wait, it didn’t make any sense.” Heat returned—fast, angry. “She hired me to find proof of Nico cheating on her. Why would she blackmail me?”

“Maybe she’s tired of waiting until you finish the job.” He shrugged. “Maybe she decided to get some proof herself.”

“Then why would she send it to me?”

“Maybe to force you to panic and work fast against Nico? I don’t know.” He raised his hands. “Maybe the compromising pictures of him and you are her last resort but also her weapon against you.”

I sat back like someone had pulled the ground an inch lower. The diner’s clatter receded. Camille’s name rearranged the last few weeks with cruel efficiency: the rushing, the money on the table, the flinch when I asked why the hurry. She needed proof—not truth. She needed pressure.

“Something isn’t right here,” I said to no one. The photo on the screen looked like a courtroom exhibit. “She’s playing two games.”

“Or one game with two boards.” Daniel closed the laptop gently, like it might bite. “Either way, she’s not your friend.”

“She was never my friend,” I said, and realized that somewhere in the middle of rooftop laughter I had forgotten the difference.

What I should have done was call Adrian; call Nico; say we were compromised. What I wanted to do was walk to Camille’s mirror-walled penthouse and snap it in half. Instead, I breathed. “I’m going to see him,” I said. “Nico.”

Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “You want backup?”

“No.” I stood, gathering my files like armor. “I want answers.”

He slid a business card across—one of his spares with a number only three people had. “Text me when you’re done. And Iris?”

“What?”

“Confetti, remember.”

“Go to hell.”

He grinned. “Bring postcards.”

***

The lobby swallowed me in a wash of marble and meaningless plants. Elevator, ding, floor, hallway—my brain ran a timetable; my heart ran the rooftop reel: Nico’s mouth rounding at forever, Adrian’s quiet choices. I pushed through the glass doors of my building with intent, stepped into the river of people—and crashed straight into a current I knew.

“Another coincidence?” I asked dryly, staring at Steve’s stupidly familiar grin. Mockery was the only blade I trusted not to slip.

“No,” he said, delighted with himself. “I was looking for you on purpose.”

“Of course you were.”

He held out an envelope like a magician who thought he invented misdirection. I didn’t take it. He tucked it into my hand anyway. Heavy card stock; embossed letters; money trying to smell like taste.

“A party,” he announced, as if I’d asked. “Housewarming. Celebration of my triumphant return to New York. All sorts of important personas. Press. Judges. Sharks.”

“I’m allergic to saltwater.”

“You’ll live.” He tipped his head at the card. “You can bring a plus one,” he added, smirking.

A plus one. He let the words dangle there between us like a hook baited with history.

I gave him nothing. I stepped past him without a word, pocketing the invitation because not.

Nico’s studio was twenty minutes uptown if I pretended traffic loved me. I started walking. Camille. The name sat in my mouth like a secret with edges.

If Daniel was right—and he usually was—then the wife who had hired me was also the shadow who had been cornering me in pixels. Not to go public. To push. To fracture me into usefulness. And to set the stage. Because if the photos ever saw daylight, they’d burn more than one person.

They’d singe a city’s appetite for scandal; they’d rewrite Serena’s and Camille’s marriages as theater; they’d turn Adrian and Nico into animals in a glass case. They’d turn me into a knife.

A streetlight flipped; I crossed; a horn yelled at me for being alive. My phone buzzed. I didn’t touch it. I kept walking.

Halfway to the subway, I stopped. I stared at the invitation in my pocket like it might confess. Steve’s house, an event designed to be photographed. You can bring a plus one. The part of me that still bled wanted to weaponize the line—walk in with two. The part of me that thought long-term heard Daniel’s voice: Sometimes the bomb is confetti.