“Thank you for meeting me. I know this is...” She paused, and I watched her search for the right word. “I know things ended badly.”
“They ended.” I kept my voice neutral. “I’m not sure ‘badly’ is the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
I thought about it. “Predictably.”
She flinched. Just slightly, just enough that I noticed the small tightening around her eyes, the fractional drop of her shoulders.
“That’s fair.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Outside the window, a city bus rumbled past, belching exhaust, its brakes squealing as it stopped at the corner. A woman in a puffy coat and earmuffs hurried past, head down against the wind. February in Boston. Everyone looked cold and miserable.
“I owe you an apology,” Maggie said. “A real one. Not the kind where I make a joke and change the subject.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited, watching her face, trying to read whatever was happening behind those green eyes.
She took a breath, the kind of breath people take before they jump off something high.
“My mother left when I was twelve. Just... walked out one day. No warning, no real explanation. She sent birthday cards for a few years, and then nothing.”
She stared at her coffee, not at me. Her fingers traced the rim of the cup, around and around. “My dad never recovered. He just... crumbled. Stopped being a person, really. Went through the motions until his heart gave out when I was nineteen.”
I knew some of this. Fragments she’d let slip over the year we’d been dancing around each other, pieces I’d had to assemble myself because she’d never told the whole story at once. But she’d never laid it out like this. Straight, unguarded, without the protective layer of sarcasm she usually wrapped around anything real.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s?—”
“It did a number on me.” She cut me off, and I understood, she needed to get it all out before she lost her nerve.
“Watching someone love that hard and then just... shatter when it was gone. I decided somewhere along the way that I’d never let anyone matter that much. That if I kept one foot out the door, I’d be the one leaving instead of the one left behind.”
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were bright, not quite wet but close. I’d never seen Maggie this close to tears over anything that wasn’t a book.
“I’ve been unfair to you. I pushed you away every time things got real because I was terrified of what would happen if I let you in. And that’s not—” She swallowed, her throat moving visibly. “That’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
I didn’t know what to say. In a year of pushing and pulling, of canceled plans and unanswered calls, Maggie had never once admitted she was scared. Never once taken responsibility for the distance between us without immediately deflecting into a joke.
“I know you’re seeing Rebecca,” she said.
The shift caught me off guard. “It’s not serious,” I heard myself say. “We’re just... It’s casual. She’s easy to be with.”
The words hung between us. I watched Maggie absorb them, watched her understand exactly what I wasn’t saying.Easy. Uncomplicated. Not like you.
She nodded slowly, looking down at her coffee again. “Not like me.”
“Maggie—”
“No, it’s okay. I earned that.” She looked up again, and there was something steady in her expression now, like she’d found solid ground. “I’m not asking you to break up with her. I’m just asking for a chance. A real one. To show you I’ve changed.”
I stared at her across the table, this woman I’d spent a year wanting and three months trying to forget. This wasn’t the Maggie I knew. The woman I knew would never ask for something this directly, would never make herself this vulnerable, would never sit in a diner booth and admit she was scared and ask for another chance like it was simple.
“What changed?” The question came out before I could stop it.
She was quiet for a long moment. I watched her weigh something—options, words, truths she couldn’t tell me. Her fingers had stopped tracing the cup. She sat very still.
“I woke up,” she said finally. “I just... woke up.”
She stood, leaving a few dollars on the table for her untouched coffee.
