“Very much,” she said.
He looked at his phone for a moment. Then at her.
“I didn’t go,” he said.
She waited.
“Carolina texted when I was already on the way.” He paused. “I turned around.”
She kept her expression neutral.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking,” he continued. He rubbed his face with both hands in the slow, heavy way people do when they are not sure how to begin. “About what I was doing. Where I was going.”
The room was quiet.
Not the comfortable quiet of two people who know each other well enough to share silence easily.
A different kind. The kind that forms when something has been acknowledged that cannot be unacknowledged.
“And?” she said.
“And I don’t have a good explanation for any of it,” he said. “I kept telling myself it was nothing. That I was just — I don’t know. I kept finding ways to not call it what it was.”
She sat down in the chair across from him.
She did not rush to fill the silence with reassurance.
She had spent a long time filling silences that were not hers to fill.
The Thing She Had Decided to Say
When she finally spoke, her voice was even and unhurried.
She was not performing calm. She had simply arrived at a place beyond the stage where things needed to be performed.
“I am not going to spend the next season of my life wondering where you are,” she said. “I am not going to keep watching for signs and making excuses and managing my own intuition into silence.”
He looked at her.
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