“She was depressed,” her sister said. “Everyone knew it.”

“Was she?” Aaron asked, taking a sip of his coffee. “I didn’t know her. I’m just here with Sarah.”

Aaron took his coffee black, cutting it with exactly one teaspoon of sugar. Rebecca used to tell me that you could tell a lot about a man by how he takes his coffee. Like Richard, my last boyfriend. He took his with so much milk it was practically cold. Rebecca would say this was because he was watered down and bland. The boyfriend before that, Jake, took it with eight fake sugars. Way too falsely sweet, she’d say.

Rebecca always had an opinion on everybody’s coffee. Everybody’s coffee, everybody’s personality, everybody’s everything. She worked at the organic market in Queens, and she swore the free radicals bouncing around the store gave her insights other people didn’t have.

I wished Rebecca were here right now. Here in that flowy mass of brightly-colored scarves, cutting through the room of black like a razor over dark flesh.

“Hey,” I said, stepping up next to Aaron. I nodded to Rebecca’s sister. “The toilet’s clogged. I don’t want to bother your mom about it.”

“Yeah, it does that. I’ll fix it.” She shoved her half-drunk coffee into my hands, spilling some of the overly sweet mixture onto my wrists and over the hem of my sweater. Rebecca’s sister never finished her coffee; Rebecca would always say so. She also cut it down with water, which made no sense to me at all, but seemed to tell volumes to Rebecca.

“Here,” Aaron said, taking the cup from my hands. He tossed it into a wastebin and grabbed a few napkins from the table. I sighed. He was too sweet for someone who didn’t put more than a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee.

“I wish I could tell you that all of this is the reason for the way her sister acts,” I said as Aaron dabbed at my wrists. “But she’s always been like this.”

“Guessing you two don’t get along, eh?” he asked. His fingers were sturdy, calloused, and incredibly pale. He was, in many ways, the exact opposite of Rebecca. She was delicate and thin and her skin was so dark it seemed to shine like black marble in the sunlight, her hair kinky and natural and standing on all ends. She wrapped herself up in so many layers that oftentimes I would see only a peek of dark fingertips under a bright scarf, or the slip of a thin leg under the hem of a bohemian skirt. She was my exotic confidant, where Aaron was like my Viking, standing blond and tall next to me through this.

“This is not how I imagined we’d spend our second date,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”

Aaron shook his head. He’d put something in his hair so it didn’t move. He looked so put together. I couldn’t even imagine how I looked.

“I’m not having you here alone,” he said. “I just wish there was more I could do.”

I believed him. He had this way about him, this sincerity that was almost painful. When he first met me three days ago, he told me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. I had never been called beautiful, not in my whole life. Well, not by anyone other than Rebecca. The way she would say it was in a mystical, trace-like way, like a psychic examining an aura. She meant it with every fiber of her tiny being, but it was different than when Aaron said it. When Aaron told me I was beautiful, it was like he’d come to some serious discovery; like he’d just seen a jewel jabbed into the wall of the coffee shop where we met, not me. He made me feel special in a way that none of the other men I’d dated made me feel special.

“I wish you could’ve met her,” I said.

“Me, too.”

I nodded and reached out to straighten his tie. It didn’t need to be straightened; I just wanted to touch him. The short chuckle that came out of my mouth was humorless. “You know, three days ago I didn’t want that.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“She had this way,” I started, and I was surprised to hear my voice sharp and cracking. “This way of just screwing everything up with me and guys. She always knew how to say something was wrong and just suddenly it was wrong. And I hated her for it.”

Aaron went quiet.

“You’re just so nice, Aaron,” I said. “So nice, and I wanted you to stay nice. Stay sincere and—I didn’t want her to break the lie, if it was a lie. I wanted it to be real and mine, and she wouldn’t understand that.”

He waited, patiently listening. Like a puppy waiting for orders, waiting to please me. I let go of his tie. I didn’t want to touch him anymore. I wanted to hit him. I wanted him to stop being nice. The nicer he was, the more I thought about Rebecca.

“She wasn’t depressed,” I said, and my voice was suddenly louder. Some people were staring at me. “I knew her. I knew her better than everyone. I would’ve seen it if she were.”

He didn’t seem to see the people staring at me. He didn’t notice them, just like he didn’t notice any of the other girls in the coffee shop. Hate bubbled under my skin.  I wanted to hate him, because I didn’t want to hate Rebecca. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.

“We took our coffee the same way and that was why we were soulmates. She told me so. But a lot of people take their coffee like us, but she chose me. Out of all the people in the world, she had to choose me. And then she does this.” I gestured to the room full of people in black, and then to the spread of food, all the processed and greasy cuts of meat that Rebecca would never have touched.

He misinterpreted me. “Why don’t I get you a coffee?” Sincerity again. Full and strong and god, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle the sincerity in his voice and how badly he wanted to make it right.

“How am I supposed to drink coffee again when she can never have it, ever again?”