I should say something. I rang him, for God’s sake, but the words won’t come. My throat is thick and full, and I start shaking.
"I know it's been — I know," he says, filling the silence. A pause. "I've almost not-called about sixty times in the past year."
He doesn't sayhow are you.He doesn't ask where I am.
"I wasn't there,” he continues, like he’s rehearsed this. “When your mother was sick. When she died. I wasn't there, and I'm sorry, and I know sorry doesn't fix it."
A beat. Then, quieter, he continues.
"I found one of her sweaters last week. In a box I hadn't opened." Another pause. "I sat on the floor with it for a while."
The fluorescent lights hum. A child across the terminal explains something urgent to his father, both hands moving.
"I'm trying to get better. Get off the booze. I’ve got a sponsor and everything. I don't know if that means anything to you. But I wanted you to know."
I press my thumbnail into my palm.
"I've been trying to figure out how to call you for a long time. I kept thinking I'd wait until I had the right words." A short sound, almost a laugh, broken at the edges. "I still don't have them. I just — I kept your number under your name. Never changed it. The picture's still the one from Christmas the year you were sixteen. Your mom took it. You're standing in front of the tree and you've got tinsel in your hair." He stops. "She's in the background. You can't really see her face, but she's there."
My throat closes.
"I look at it sometimes," he says, quietly. "That's all."
The departure board clicks through another destination.
I manage one word. "Okay."
"I love you. I know I haven't — I know that probably sounds strange. But I do."
He sounds like a man reading from notes he wrote to himself, words he rehearsed, then kept anyway when the real moment arrived. The love in it is real regardless. Imperfect but real.
He’s trying. That’s something, at least.
"Okay," I say again, because it's all I have.
"I’m proud of you, Wren. What you did for your mother. Thank you."
The call ends a minute later. Not cleanly — it just reaches its natural limit, two people with no practiced language for this, saying what they can and stopping before it breaks further.
I sit with the phone in one hand and fifteen minutes on the clock, and something assembles itself in my chest.
He said I love you. He knows it might not mean anything. He said it anyway.
Logan never said it. But neither did I.
If the man who failed me most completely — who drank while I managed her medications, who disappeared while I held her hand through a dying that took six years — if that man can reach across five years of silence and sayI wasn't there, I'm trying to be different—
What exactly am I doing on this bench? Other than shaking and, now, crying.
Running from emptiness is just motion. When you feel nothing, leaving takes nothing from you. You drift to the next city and you don't miss what you left because you never let yourself have it.
Running from love is different. Running from love is amputation. Cutting away the part of yourself that finally woke up, that finally came back online after years of static — and carrying the wound with you city to city.
I can feel the cost of it already. The loss that would follow me now, because I'm not numb anymore, because I don't have that protection left.
And underneath that: I have things to say that I didn't say. The safeword I held in my mouth and never used — not from fear of him but from something else, something I need to explain if he'll let me. Why I froze. How I feel. Those things are still mine. Still unsaid. Still worth saying.
The departure board clicks. New Orleans.
