Pratt's hands were loose on his thighs. He was giving me all the space I wanted.
"That picture of us on the beach in the bedroom," I said. "That's what summers were like until the real world leaked in as we got older."
I told him about our drift when I decided I wanted out of the Boston area. It was two lives moving in slightly different directions, the way they do when you're in your mid-twenties and convinced that the people who matter will always be there because they always have been.
"Providence," I said. "I sublet a place there for about a year. There was a bar that needed someone, and I liked the change.Bryan was an hour away. Close enough that it wasn't hard to get together, but it didn't happen often."
I stopped there for a second.
"The last time I saw him in person was at a diner," I said. "I was passing through Boston between seeing my parents and driving back to Providence. We met at the diner for two hours. It was talking about ordinary stuff. He walked me to my car and said I should call him the next week. I said yeah, definitely."
I inhaled.
"I didn't call that week," I said. "Or the one after."
I didn't offer my reasons.
"His mom called me on a Sunday morning two weeks later," I said. "She opened withthis is Bryan's mom.She'd been Mrs. Baker my whole life." I did my best to keep my voice even when I said the next part. "He used a gun."
Pratt didn't move.
I kept going because stopping there would settle on the worst of all of it.
"I moved to Chicago a year later," I said. "Got the job at Carver's. My grandpa gave me money. I built a new—" I gestured at the condo. "They liked me at my job. I told myself it was who I was—a people person. I enjoyed closing out the bar at two in the morning with strangers." I looked at Pratt's hands folded in his lap. "It wasn't a lie, exactly. I do like people, but that wasn't why I moved here and took the job."
"The records," Pratt said.
"Yeah. His mom went through his room," I said. "It took her a while. At the bottom of a closet, she found a box. It was a bunch of records. Some of them were Bryan's. Some were mine. I'd lent him a stack before I left for Providence and just never asked for them back. She mailed the two Fleetwood Mac albums." I exhaled through my nose.
I pressed my lips together for a second.
Pratt was quiet.
"She put a note at the bottom of the box," I said. "Cath did." I could say the words now. They were still heavy, but I could get through them. "She said he talked about me all the time."
We were both silent for a beat.
"If he did," I said, my voice quieter, "then he knew I would have picked up. He knew I would have gotten in my car. He didn't call."
A longer beat.
"But I didn't call him either."
That was it. I'd gotten through all of it without skipping any important parts.
Pratt waited. "There's something else. I said it to you in your condo the other night. It was about you doing the same thing."
"I remember," he said.
"I'm not saying it the same way now. It's not the same panic. I know you're not Bryan." I reached out for his hand. "But I didn't say the underneath part. I said I was afraid of losing you, and I left out why I hadn't said it sooner."
He didn't speak.
"If I say it, then it makes it real, and real things can go wrong." I took a breath. "As long as I didn't say it out loud, I could pretend nothing was at stake. I could keep moving and just think you were something good happening in the next-door condo." I looked at him. "The problem was that it was already real."
Neither of us moved. I could barely breathe.
"I've been waiting for the right time," I said.
