Maybe I was easier to let go of than I thought.
Jake’s voice, the one I can never fully get rid of, whispers from the back of my mind.You always come on too strong, Ella. You read too much into things.
And Honey Carlisle in the boutique, all that immaculate composure.The vacation stays in the vacation, Ella. Something with an expiration date.
And then there’s my own voice, which is the worst one of all.You ran instead of staying. You packed your bag while he was trying to talk to you. You said “that only makes it worse” to a man who was handing you his heart, and you used his honesty as a reason to walk out. You’ve been doing this since Jake, and you haven’t learned anything.
Where was all this great insight before I jumped into that car and sped away?
A woman at table three orders chocolate cake. For one bright, quick second, I’m somewhere else. Candlelight on a beach. The ocean. Alec across a table from me, his eyes tender on me, his deep voice saying all the right things. The fullness of that night when I knew him more than I’d known anyone. When I still didn’t know the one thing that would end us.
Right. Table three. Chocolate cake. I write it on the ticket with a smile on my face, shoving the memories back into the box where I’ll keep them for the rest of my life.
Six o’clock rolls by, and my first shift ends. Twelve hours on my feet, and every one of them was easier than the minutes in between when my mind slipped its leash and went back to Brooklyn.
I push through the kitchen door. The back room is quiet. My purse is on the shelf. I reach for my phone slowly, not sure I want to see what’s on the screen.
The screen lights up.
One missed call. Alec.
No voicemail. No text. No message. Just his name on my screen, the record of a call that came and went while I was carrying plates and pouring coffee and telling myself I could survive this.
I stare at it. The back room is silent around me. The kitchen noise fades to a low hum behind the door.
One call. That’s it.
Why didn’t he leave a message? Something. Anything.
All day, I’ve been rehearsing how I would respond if he reached out. Amid the coffee pots and the bright voice and the cloth wiping the same counter over and over. Amid all of it is a sentence I wouldn’t let myself say last night:I’m sorry too. Can we talk?
I was almost there. Almost brave enough to reach first, to risk caring too much, because caring too much has always been who I am and I am so tired of apologizing for it.
Now I see that Alec did call, but he gave me nothing to hold on to.
Maybe he was being polite. The decent-man check-in after a breakup.Just making sure you landed safe.A period at the end of a sentence, not the start of a new one.
Maybe it was closure. His way of drawing the line.
Or maybe—even worse—it was a butt dial. He sat on his phone. My name came up. It rang and he never even noticed.
Somehow that would be the most perfectly on-brand ending to this entire disaster.
The joke is there for half a second and then it’s gone. What’s underneath isn’t funny. What’s underneath is the small, stubborn thing I’ve been carrying since dawn. The belief that he would call, that he wouldn’t give up on me. That a man who loves me and stood at the curb watching my car drive away would not just let me go.
The thread holding it snaps. The thing it was supporting folds down to a place I can’t reach.
My thumb hovers over his name. I could call back. Right now. I could hear his voice and find out which story I’m living in.Whether I’m the woman he loves or the woman he’s closing the book on.
But I don’t trust what I’d hear. If he gives me the polite thing, the just-checking-in voice, it will confirm what the silence has been saying all day. If he doesn’t answer, the quiet will be worse than the one I’m already living in.
And if he says the right thing, the real thing, I will fold. I know I will. I’ll say I’m sorry and I miss you and I’ll hand him the power to hurt me again, and I cannot tell whether folding is brave or whether it’s the thing that finishes me.
The not knowing will haunt me forever. I was able to get over Jake, but this is different. Alec is different. What I feel for him isn’t going to go away. I’m never going to get over him.
I tap his name. Hold. Select block.
The screen confirms it. The option to hear his voice at two in the morning when the missing gets bad enough to overrule my judgment is gone now. I’ve taken it away. Not because I’m angry. Because the inch of open door that one missed call was able to crack is more than I can stand to live inside. I need it closed.
