“She knows where to find us. When she’s ready.”
“Yeah? And how’s that been working?” He steps closer. “She’s been in LA for weeks. She went through an abortion that was our fault and didn’t tell either of us.”
“She told Callie.”
“Callie isn’t us.” He holds my gaze. “You keep talking about giving her space. You just got here yesterday. When’s the last time you pushed through when she needed you to, instead of backing off the second she puts up a wall?”
I want to fire back. I want to point to every careful decision: the reassignment, the proximity, the boundaries I respected because I thought that’s what she needed.
“I’m doing what she asked for.”
“No, you’re doing what’s comfortable and calling it what she asked for. There’s a difference.” His voice is rising now. “She sat at that table all night and nobody—nobody—pulled her aside and said hey, you don’t have to hold this by yourself.”
He drags a hand through his hair. “Nina doesn’t ask for help. She never has. She retreats and she manages and she convinces herself she’s fine, and if you wait for her to come to you, you will wait forever. Telling us alone had to have been hell.”
“I was trying to give her room to come to us on her own terms.”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Wyatt.” The same words from Nina’s apartment in Denver, standing over boxes I’d packed with too much care. But this time there’s no gentleness in it. “You see someone drowning and you stand on the shore and call it respecting their space.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Was it fair to her? Sitting at that table, falling apart, while you monitored her between courses?”
Seeing it from his side changes the shape of it. Every moment I filed under giving her space rearranges into something uglier: watching her drown and calling it patience.
“Fine,” I say, and my voice is harder than I expect. “I failed her tonight. I knew she was struggling and I told myself the timing wasn’t right. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want you to mean it.”
“I mean it.” I’m off the counter now, closing the distance between us. “I mean every goddamn word. I should have pulled her aside. I should have pulled both of you aside. I should have done a hundred things differently and instead I sat there, and she had to carry it alone, and now she’s gone. I know. I know.”
We’re standing too close. Both of us breathing hard.
“But don’t you dare stand there and tell me I don’t show up. When she learned you were alive, I stood by her. Listened to her spinning her wheels over what it would mean, hearing between the words her unspoken question about whether you’d be the same man she loved when you left. Whether you’d want her back. When she called that week after the wedding, I was there. I packed up her apartment. I carried boxes for a woman who was leaving and I didn’t ask her to stay because she didn’t want to be asked. Where were you? Walking out of that hotel room before sunrise. Three weeks and not a call, not a text, not a goddamn word.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“You had one night where you let yourself be real, and you couldn’t get away fast enough. And you want to talk about showing up?”
His jaw is set. He doesn’t deny it. He just stands there. Takes it. And that makes it worse. Because I don’t have any of that left.
“It didn’t just break her, Chris.” My voice cracks and I hate it. “It broke me too. That night meant something to me—not just because of Nina. Because of you. And you left, and I had to act like that was fine, like I was only mourning what she lost, like I didn’t lose something too.”
I stop. Because I can hear what I’m saying. And the shift in his expression tells me he hears it too.
The combativeness drains out of his expression. What replaces it is slower. Stunned. Like something he’d filed away as impossible just rearranged itself into fact.
And I want it back. Every word. Not because it isn’t true, but because I just handed Chris Longo the most dangerous thing I own and I can’t undo it.
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks away.
When he speaks, his voice is flat. Controlled. The wrong kind of steady.
“I’m going to check on Nina.”
He doesn’t wait for a response. He’s already moving—past me, toward the door. The set of his shoulders says the conversation is over. Whatever I said doesn’t rate his focus. Nina is simpler than what I just laid on him. Nina he knows how to handle.
I step into the doorway.
