I laugh. “What are you talking about? I don’t want to forget about you.”
“It’s for the best.”
“Joel, no... What?”
“This... isn’t going to work, Cal.”
Though the restaurant’s warm and full, pleasantly buzzing, our table feels suddenly cold.
“Joel,” I breathe. “We have to try. If we don’t, then we may as well give up.”
The look on his face burrows deep into my gut and stays there.
“You are,” I realize slowly, my eyes jumping with tears. “You’re giving up. You’re giving up?”
“I’m... accepting reality. That what we have... we can’t make it work.”
Across the table, I take his hand. “No, this is...No.We belong together, Joel. No one... no one can make me laugh like you do. It makes me happy just to wake up next to you every day. No one’s ever made me feel as if the world’s out there for the taking the way you have. Without you, I’d probably still be working in the café, watching my life go by. You’ve made me excited for the future again. We can get through this... Iknowwe can.”
He shakes his head. “I’m only going to hold you back, Callie. I don’t want you to miss out on the... amazing life you deserve.”
“No.No.An amazing life—that’s the one I have with you.”
Somewhere behind his eyes, a door swings shut. I notice his fingerstightening around the stem of his wineglass. He’s hardly touched his dessert. “Not if I can’t do what you need me to do.”
“What do I need you to do?” But I know, I know.
“You need me to carry on as if nothing’s happened, to live with what I dreamed every day, pretending I didn’t. I can’t do it, Cal. I just... can’t.” The words heave from his chest like a dying breath. “You should forget me now. Get out there and live.”
What I want to say is,How?But instead I say, “You’re wrong.”
“Someone... someone else could give you so much more than I can.”
I take a sharp breath, startle back from even the thought of it.
Joel’s voice splinters. “I can’t deny you a future, Callie. Possibilities. Nothing would make me happier than to see you happy. And while we’re living with what I dreamed every day, that’s never going to happen. You know that, don’t you?”
Piece by piece, this conversation is taking me apart. My fingers have gone numb, my toes are detached from my feet—but still I’m going to fight for us. “No. I love you, Joel, and I know you love me. This is too good to give up. There’s got to be a way we can... Why don’t you go back to Diana?” I say, in desperation. “She said she might be able to help.”
“But she can’t change the future, Callie,” he whispers, his eyes full of sadness. And as he speaks, the weight of everything he’s saying takes me down, because I know he’s ending it here, tonight, now.
“This is all for nothing,” I say, one last attempt to get through to him. “Because even if you told me what you know, our lives wouldn’t be better. They’d be worse. Telling me isn’t the answer.”
“Then there’s no more we can...” But he trips over his words and can’t finish.
I keep staring, and we keep saying nothing, and soon my tears are too heavy to hold back. Because maybe if what he’s saying is true—if he really can’t live with it—then there isn’t a way forward.
Maybe there just isn’t.
“Something has to change, Cal,” he says eventually, softly. “One of us just needed to say it.”
I’m shaking my head now. Not because I still think I can change his mind, but because I’m winded, in shock. “I can’t... believe this.”
His expression says he can’t believe it either. So sudden and brutal, like a heart attack or a car crash.
As my eyes start leaking tears, the flame from the tea-light seems to flicker sympathy. “I’ve had the best year of my life,” I say, because I need him to know.
“I think for you,” he whispers, “the best is yet to come.”
