I shut my eyes and softly hit the back of my head against the wall behind me. “Why are you here, Miles?”
“Came to check on you.”
I look at him. “But why?”
He looks back. “Because that’s what friends do.”
I quietly scoff, gaze dropping to the ball of toilet paper in my hands. “Friends?” I sniff. “Is that what we are?”
“I mean...” he lilts, “at theveryleast, yeah.”
I turn back, trying to read his face.
“We can’t get into that right now.” He smirks.
I sigh a tired sigh and bring the already-used tissue up to my nose again. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
I shake my head. “There’s no coming back from this.”
He reaches over and takes my hand. “There is. We just need to find it.”
I look at him like he’s nuts.
He pats my hand. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to rage out for, like, three minutes. In that three minutes, you’re going to voice every single negative thought you’re thinking right now. Okay?”
I frown. “Why three minutes?”
“Because I don’t want to listen to you for five.”
I snort out a laugh, and Miles’s mouth twitches up in a tiny smile. He lets my hand go, pulls out his phone, and sets the timer for three minutes.
“You’re serious,” I say.
“Always serious about raging out,” he says.
“Is this some trick you learned in therapy?” I swipe my nose with the back of my hand.
“No,” he says. “I’m just spitballing here. I have no idea if this is going to help. But it’s the verbal equivalent of a punching bag, so it seems like it would.”
“A punching bag might be better.”
He eyes me for a beat, thumb hovering over the start button of the timer. He shakes the phone as if to ask if I’m ready.
I sniff and wipe the last of my mascara off my face. I nod. “Ready.”
“Okay... go.”
When I close my eyes, the floodgates open, and I decide not to censor myself at all.
“When I decided to move here, John told me it was a terrible idea. He said I’d never make it without him, even though, if I’d stayed in Colorado, I would’ve had to move out of our house and figure out a way to make it without him anyway. But that planted this little seed that moving here was stupid. A bad idea. That I wasn’t going to be able to hack it.
“Then I got here, and I was terrified. And I was afraid he was right. Afraid that I couldn’t do this. Who am I to even try?”
I draw in a breath, thinking back on those first weeks here in the city. Thinking back on the app dates that were terrible, but slowly helped me build my confidence. The walks around my neighborhood that started to get more familiar. The people who had come into my life along the way.
I look at Miles.
