I sat back. The booth creaked.
"I'm not forgiving you tonight. I want to be clear about that."
"I didn't come here expecting that."
"And I'm not saying it's fine, or that we're past it, or that the next conversation won't be harder than this one."
"Okay."
"What I'm saying is I'm willing to try. That's all I have."
"That's enough."
"It might not be."
"I know. But it's what we've got."
I looked at him across the table. The low light caught the hollows under his eyes. He'd made me feel real in a way that no roster spot or paycheck had ever done. That hadn't gone anywhere. It was sitting next to the anger the way a bruise sat inside the body while it was healing—tender and changing color day by day.
"We should go," I said.
I'd already put cash on the table. We slid out of the booth and stood.
Kieran at his full height. I'd forgotten his presence. Three weeks of absence had filed him down to a voice I wasn't answering and a face I was tracking across locker rooms from a deliberate distance. Standing this close, near enough that I could smell his soap under the bar's stale air, the scale reasserted itself—shoulders and chest. I knew how it felt to press against them.
I didn't step back.
Kieran's right hand rose. Not far—three inches, maybe four, a motion that started at the wrist and died before the elbow joined it. His fingers opened once toward my forearm and then closed, and his hand dropped back to his side.
He didn’t touch me. He stopped himself, the way I’d stopped myself from telling him exactly why this hurt.
Still, I'd seen it. The hand rising, and the fingers opening. The decision to stop, made a half-second too late to pretend it hadn't happened.
He knew I'd seen it.
Neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say.
We walked to the door. On the sidewalk, Kieran stopped.
He looked at me. I looked back. Not past him. Not at the safe space beside his ear where I'd been parking my gaze for three weeks. Directly at him.
Then I nodded. He nodded. I turned left. He turned right. Our footsteps separated, and the city filled in the gap immediately.
Chapter twenty
Kieran
Iprinted the document at a FedEx on West Randolph at four in the afternoon.
The guy behind the counter didn't look at the content. Seven pages, single-spaced. He handed them to me in a plastic sleeve, charged $3.80, and went back to his phone.
Three dollars and eighty cents for the complete written record of how I'd dismantled two futures with a single signature.
My condo was clean when I got home. I'd wiped the counters at six in the morning when my bed tired of me and kicked me out. I'd done the dishes because my hands needed something with a clear endpoint. Gerald was on his coral, picking at nothing, ruling over territory the size of a paperback novel.
I set the pages on the kitchen table. Squared the edges against the surface. Moved my laptop beside them, open to the file in case Heath wanted to see the original.
He had texted that morning.
