“Why.”
He didn’t add anything to it. No charge, no elaborate accusation. Just the single word, in the even voice, in the room where he’d already told me everything and closed the door quietly.
There were versions of this answer, too. The obvious ones: I didn’t want to upset you before practice, I didn’t want to tell you until I had more information, I didn’t know how real it was yet. All true in small ways and all fundamentally beside the point.
I looked at him.
“Because I didn’t want you to,” I stopped. My jaw did the thing. He watched it. “I didn’t want it to be the reason.”
His expression shifted then, slightly more. Not a flinch. Not quite. The specific stillness of someone registering that they are standing at the edge of a sentence they have waited a long time to hear and the person saying it has just stopped halfway.
He stared at me.
“The reason for what, Felix?” he said.
The question landed in the room and stayed there.
Not rhetorical. Not thrown. Just , placed between us, clean and specific and impossible to sidestep.
The air felt very clear.
I had been running from that question for two years. I had changed the subject, diverted, made jokes, made systems. I had built cases and columns and workouts and protocols to avoid standing in a living room with Shay O’Brien looking at me like that and asking me, directly, what this was the reason for.
The file upstairs was done.
The ice was cold.
The window was open.
He was standing in his apartment, not performing, not pushing, just waiting.
The reason for what, Felix?
I looked at him.
The word was there.
I opened my mouth.
Chapter Eighteen
Felix
The word was there.
It had been there for a long time. Two years, if I was being conservative. Longer, if I was being precise, which I usually was in every area except this one. It sat just behind my teeth now, the way a puck sits on a stick blade when you’ve overhandled it and there’s nowhere left to go but the net.
Shay looked at me.
“The reason for what, Felix?” he said.
Not sharp. Not pleading. Just clean. Exact.
The apartment was very quiet.
The dead plant on the windowsill. The throw blanket on the couch. The faint city noise through the glass. All the details I had catalogued for years , the system I had built around not saying this word , and none of them were useful now.
Henry’s voice, unhelpfully, arrived in my head.
