“I thought I wanted apology,” I say, eyes on the page. “I thought that’s what would let me breathe.”
“And?” His thumb strokes my wrist again, slow.
“I wanted to know I wasn’t the only one who kept living inside that night.” I turn my head and look at him full-on. “I wanted to know it mattered to you the way it mattered to me, and that you didn’t let go. You didn’t.”
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you send them?”
He inhales like he’s lifting something. “Because every letter felt like asking you to stand in the ash with me. Because I didn’t know how to love you without making you carry my ghosts.”
“You could have asked.” My mouth twists. “I’m good at triage.”
He huffs. A ghost of a grin. “Yeah. You are.”
We sit. The fire eats quietly. The river continues its dark hum. The lights overhead swing and steady and swing again.
“Savannah,” he says after a while, voice the shape of a confession. “I was going to wipe your tears.”
“I saw.” I tighten my fingers around his because I can’t put my mouth where I want it, not yet. “This is better.”
His breath stutters. He stares at our hands like they’re something sacred and dangerous. “If I touch your face, I won’t stop there.”
“Good,” I say before I can stop the word. Heat climbs my neck. I add, softer, “Soon.”
He curses into his chest, gentle and filthy. My toes curl in my boots.
“Okay,” he says on a hard exhale. “Soon.”
I lift the box and shuffle deeper, strings of dates and months passing under my thumb—proof that time is a real thing and not an enemy we invented to explain our losses.
“Pick one,” I say, offering the stack to him.
His head jerks. “No. They’re yours.”
“Pick one,” I insist. “Read it to me.”
His eyes search mine for the trap. He doesn’t find one. He plucks a medium envelope from the middle, the paper wrinkled from being carried around.
He clears his throat. The firelight warms the words as they come.
September 2
I saw a girl in a red raincoat on the ridge and thought it was you coming home in weather like a dare. I followed her too far and felt like a fool when she turned and wasn’t you. I apologized in my head like that counts. It doesn’t. I miss you. I started running in the mornings. It doesn’t help and I keep doing it. I think about putting new wiring in every old house in town with my bare hands until the skin peels as if that’s how you fix the part of a night that doesn’t have edges. I wish you were here to tell me to eat. I wish I’d told you to stay.
His voice breaks on the last line. Not much. Enough to make me want to turn this bench into a bed and let him rough his hands up on my spine just to unwind that sound out of him with something better.
“Ax,” I say softly.
He blows a breath out and tips his head back to look at the slice of stars between branches. “I keep thinking there’s a right thing to say,” he murmurs. “There isn’t.”
“There’s the true thing.”
His head comes down. “Which is?”
“I remember the smell of your shirts in winter,” I say. “I remember the sound you make right before you laugh, like it hurts to admit you’re about to. I remember the way you held me when the doctor told us my mom was out of time. I remember the river in your eyes when you watched my house burn and how I stopped being afraid when I found your face in that smoke. I remember wanting you at sixteen in a way that felt like a house being built and a fire at the same time. I remember leaving and hating myself and loving my choice and wishing choices didn’t tear people in half.”
His fingers flex around mine like I pulled a wire tight under his skin. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to.
