I press my thumb into the edge of the steering wheel until it hurts. My therapist would say Ground yourself: five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear. I can see dust on steering wheel. I can hear Evelyn breathing, which feels like a responsibility.
“Evelyn,” I say softly, “you don’t have to walk it again.”
“I do,” she says, and there’s flint under the fatigue. “I have to keep him alive in some way. He was my husband. Guy was my husband.”
Her words ping around the room, ricocheting off my ribs.
Guy, Evelyn’s husband.
Guy, my lover, my heart and soul. The man I loved.
Guy, the man who was mugged and stabbed to death one night a year ago.
The room tilts. I think about Guy’s hand on my knee under café tables, Guy’s emails at 2am — dumb memes, clever links, little yellow hearts. I think about the way he said my name — like a plan, like a joke, like a prayer. I think about the day the call came, and how grief for a person you weren’t supposed to love is an untidy thing: you can’t take it outside and shake it out. You have to swallow it whole and pretend it tastes like nothing.
“I keep thinking about the blood. I can’t stop,” she says, like we’ve been mid-conversation all year. “It was on the pavement,” she continues, voice oddly calm, like someone narrating a documentary about themselves. “The police washed it, but you can’t wash away the shape. Not really. I still see it. I still see him.”
She’s always like this when she calls: rushing, doubling back, replaying it. We haven’t spoken for months, and now here she is, flooding the line, and I’m a dam built from chewing gum and good intentions.
“I know we haven’t talked in a while,” she says quickly, as if reading my mind and trying to head me off. “I’m sorry. You were… kind, after. And then I went quiet. And then you did. And I understand. It’s… a lot.”
“It is,” I say, because I’m incapable of lying convincingly for longer than four seconds. “I’m sorry too.”
“You were his friend,” she says, and the word friend yanks at me like a hooked fish. “One of the good ones. He didn’t have many left, you know. Not really. People get tired of grief. They want you to have an end date for it, like a rental period.”
I stare ahead into the distance.
His friend.
One of the good ones.
If only she knew the truth about what we were.
“People are rubbish,” I say, and it makes her exhale a small laugh.
“I keep thinking about what he went through, how it felt. I keep thinking about the knife. Slicing into his skin.” Another pause. Then she says, almost dreamily, “The doctors said he didn’t suffer long. That it was quick, and I cling to that. But I still think about the pain. How much it hurt. How alone he must have felt.” Her voice splinters. “I keep thinking: was he frightened? Did he call out? Did anyone—” She stops. “I’m sorry. This is… I’m doing it again.”
“It’s okay,” I say, because what else can you say? No, it’s not okay, it’s awful and it will always be awful, but also we’re still here, speaking into a tiny rectangle, and that has to count for something.
“I phoned because I was scared,” she says suddenly, the words tumbling. “I woke up and it felt like a wave was over my head again and I thought: I’ll drown if I don’t hear a voice that knew him.” A breath, ragged. “And you did. You do.”
My guilt sits up and stretches, smug as a cat. She doesn’t know. She will never know, if I can help it. To her, I’m the kind friend from work, the listener, the man who will say kindly things about a husband I met on lunch breaks. She has no idea that every memory she brings up has two sets of fingerprints on it: hers and mine.
“And the police have given up. They’ll never catch who did this now. And I’ll never know. I just… I just lie in bed thinking about how I want to stab them back, slice them up, hurt them in the same way.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose until stars pop. I want to be sick and saintly at the same time. “I’m so sorry,” I say, and the uselessness of the phrase makes me want to set something on fire.
“I know,” she whispers. “I…I don’t want to keep you,” she adds quickly, because Evelyn always does: apologises for existing while phoning to prove she still does. “I just— Thank you for answering.”
“Of course,” I say, even though answering feels like letting barbed wire singe my tongue.
“Can we… could we meet?” she asks, small and brave at the same time. “Not right now. Sometime. Coffee. I’d like to talk about him with someone who… who liked the same bits I did.”
For a second I consider the clean sever: a polite no, a schedule that never lines up, a slow fade into voicemail. But then I think about Guy—about his silly optimism—and I hear myself say, “Yeah. We can do that.”
“Thank you.” Relief pours down the line like warm water.
We do the clumsy dance of goodbyes: you hang up, no you, and then the click, and then the rush of silence that is somehow louder than her voice.
