The silence stretched. I could hear the radiator, the rain against the window, and my own pulse hammering in my ears. I wanted to say something clever. Something cutting. Something that would take this awful, vulnerable moment and turn it into a joke we could both laugh about, because that’s what I did—that’s what all those years of emotional cowardice had taught me to do when someone got too close to the truth.
“Well.” My voice went bright and sharp, the way it used to when I was about to make everything worse.
“I guess we were both cowards, then. Both running in opposite directions. Very poetic. Very us.”
I laughed, and it came out brittle, defensive, the sound of someone building walls.
“At least now I know I wasn’t the only villain in this story. That’s something, right? That’s?—”
Don’t do this. Don’t you dare do this.
I caught myself mid-sentence, mid-deflection, mid-retreat. My jaw tightened. My eyes squeezed shut for just a moment, and I wrestled it down—the instinct to flee into sarcasm, to make this a competition about who hurt whom first.
When I opened my eyes again, the brittleness was gone. In its place was something rawer. Harder to say.
“No,” I said quietly. “I’m not doing that. That’s not who I want to be anymore.”
I took a breath. Then another.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out rough.
“I was about to make this into a fight so I didn’t have to feel how much this actually hurts.”
I pressed my hand to my forehead. The old me would have been halfway out the door by now. The old me would have turned this into a three-act play where she got to be the wronged party and he got to be the one who apologized.
“It hurts. Reading this. Knowing you were ready to give up on me. That hurts, and I don’t know what to do with it except tell you it hurts, instead of pretending it doesn’t.”
15
Jack
Something cracked in my chest. Not broken—cracked open. Like a window letting in cold air.
I’d watched it happen, actually watched her catch herself mid-retreat, mid-deflection. Her jaw had tightened. Her eyes had squeezed shut. And then she’d come back. Opened them and said the hardest thing instead of the easiest one.
That was new. But I couldn’t let myself soften. Not yet. Not when every other time I’d softened, she’d disappeared.
“Three times,” I said, because she deserved the whole truth. “You let me in, then pushed me away. After that weekend in the fall when we were supposed to go away—after you canceled the night before, after you stopped returning my calls for a week, I decided I was done. That letter was my goodbye.”
The admission hung in the air between us. She was shaking slightly, I could see it in her hands, still clutching the letter.
And still, somewhere underneath the hope, the old hurt stirred. The accumulation of a year’s worth ofalmost.
“You don’t get to do this,” I heard myself say.
Maggie went still. “What?”
“You don’t get to show up after months of keeping me at arm’s length and decide I’m worth staying for.”
The words came out harder than I meant them to, sharp-edged with something I hadn’t let myself feel until now.
“You don’t get to wake up one morning and become a different person and expect me to just—trust that. As if I haven’t already learned to live without you. As if I didn’t spend three months teaching myself not to hope.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Maggie’s face had gone pale, like she was seeing me clearly for the first time.
“Jack—”
