Eleventh time, two words.
I would.
* * *
Michael called him on the thirteenth Thursday, when Griffin had his hands in a particularly delicate piece of his model train set.
He dropped what he’d been holding.
He probably broke what he’d been holding, which Kevin was going to give him hell about on Tuesday, the little shit.
But he did not care.
“Mikey,” he said, when he got the phone up to his ear, and another thing that he did not care about was that he sounded slightly out of breath. Inside his chest, his heart was pounding, and along his left side, he felt a strange, uncomfortable skittering that no longer filled him immediately with dread, with frantic anticipation.
“Hey,” Michael said back, a single syllable that Griffin could not really read anything from.
There was dead air between them—a game of chicken, a game ofwho will say how are youfirst.
Griffin. Griffin would.
“You all right?” he said, which was basically the same. Gruff, maybe, but whatever. He wasn’t meant to become a differentpersonwith all this therapy.
Michael laughed. A huffing, sarcastic laugh. “Been better. You?”
He could’ve said,Same. Let the dead air stretch again, and it would have beenfine. It would’ve been familiar, even: almost every hospital room visit, Griffin getting ruder and ruder, daring Michael,beggingMichael, in the only way he knew how through all that pain, to get fuckingangry. To yell or scream or destroy something about Sara Beth being gone, the way Griffin sometimes wanted to.
Even though he really had no right to.
Even though he physicallycouldn’t.
He couldn’t ever do anything butliethere.
He took a deep breath and did not let the dead air stretch.
“I’m sorry for Paris,” he said.
But immediately, he disliked the taste of it in his mouth. It had the flavor of a lie he didn’t want to tell. The sort that didn’t help anyone, especially not himself.
“No, I’m not,” he corrected, and talk about gruff, Jesus. “I meanthat I’m sorry you got hurt. That it happened the way it did. That’s—that’s really all I mean. About being sorry.”
Good thing Fridays were for therapy. Tomorrow he would have to talk about being bad at apologies.
“You did what you had to do,” said Michael, followed by a long pause. Like he, too, was rolling around the taste of something bad.
Eventually, Michael cleared his throat. He said, “You did the only thing you could do. It was the right thing to do.”
Griffin was glad to be alone. Glad to let his eyes close in pure, simple relief.
He felt something move through him. The beginning of something he’d been waiting for.Scanningfor, every single day. A new scale, and all the levels betweenNot yetandNow.
He thought of a dark hotel room. Felt a slim, longed-for hand squeeze around his calf and heard a soft, longed-for voice say,You did right by them.
“I dared you,” intruded a different voice—another one he’d missed, sure, but right this second, it was no small effort to focus back on his best friend, who had maybe just said—
“I dared you to do it,” Michael repeated, “because I knew it had to be done. I knew it did, and I was too much of a coward to do it myself.”
After that, it was different.
