Lili nods, loosely. She tries to believe that.
“What will you do now?” James asks.
She exhales, a heavy sigh. “Move on. He’s with someone else. I have to—I have to let him. After what I did...”
She’s made such a mistake—feels such deserved shame—but she has to live with it.
She was her before him, and she will be her after him.
She has to believe that. It’s the only way forward, now. To believe that this pain is just the beginning; that there is a life beyond it for her; that there is a breath that will no longer ache; that shades of happiness torn into hurt will fade in their intensity.
I have to let you go.
And it is difficult, but she is breathing, and she will continue to breathe.
Each inhale a measure further into after, into the rest of her life.
They pack up over the next few days. Time spent on the boat, slow dinners cooked at home. They fold clothes into suitcases, run the laundry, shake out sand from shoes.
In the evenings, Lili stares at the sea, after swimming laps in the pool. She imagines him with Sanaë. She imagines the sum of all her own memories with him, fading; she starts to allow this gradual overexposure of moments, until they are bleached and white.
Beside her, lounging by the pool, James and Amina discuss plans for when they’re back in New York, a group dinner. James laughs at something in the group chat. The ice in his drink rattles as he drains his prosecco. The immense sky grows darker above them. All along the coast, villages twinkle.
In the car to the Marseille airport the next morning, she looks out the open window. Rolled down, warm air. She lets the sun rest on her face. As Amina drives, she looks back at Lili every so often, checking on her. She grasps her knee for a moment; Lili squeezes her hand.
The flight to Paris is easy. Budget airline, bright blue seats. At Charles de Gaulle, they have separate flights back to New York; they’d added Lili to the trip last minute. “Are you sure you don’t want to switch?” Amina asks. “I’m fine to take your flight instead, I’m just going to sleep—or Jamie, he could also switch out, whatever you want.”
Lili shakes her head, hugging them. “It’s okay, I’ll see you on the other end.”
After her friends leave for their gate, Lili wanders through the terminal. She stares up at the departures board, the switch of digital panels. She used to love this, looking at the countless flights in airports. The possibilities, the promise of something more; the prospect that somewhere else, she’d find it—everything that felt missing, and lost. Looking up now, she watches the flicker of cities, departure times, flights leaving, flights coming. All the places she could go, all the lives possible out there.
She wants none of them.
Lili closes her eyes, tries to push it away—but standing here, with everything in front of her, there’s nothing else.
She just wants him: Aleksandr, and the life she could have had with him.
Around her, she hears many languages, passing travelers. The comfort of the temporary, transience, rootlessness—it isn’t a comfort anymore. Dublin, Reykjavik, Cairo, Rio, Amsterdam: All this gray potential is meaningless to her, devoid of any possible sense of home. Different cities, open paths, and she wants none of them, because there’s only one place she is calculating routes to, and she is crying,she is crying, alone in the departure terminal of Charles de Gaulle.
She can go anywhere, just not the one place she wants.
And she feels it: the final shards of her heart breaking.
Whispers, low and rough; a warm hand, grasping her face, as he made her look at him.
It’s pain, Lili. Pain ends.
It ends, but only through shifting. Into a bruise, into a scar you run a finger over, something silver and faint others will ask you about in soft mornings in their bed.
But she doesn’t want only the pain of him.
She wants joy, and quiet moments, and laughter, and real smiles, and the conversations that make her want to yell at him, while he just grins, and these nights of him inside her body, how he makes her feel like she’s both made of pleasure and able to hold her own pain, and those mornings when he wakes early for a flight, but still kisses her, and the evenings when he makes dinner, and pours her wine, and shares what he’s been thinking about, and listens deeply to her thoughts in turn, and she doesn’t agreewith even half of what he believes in, what he stands for, but she wants to hear it: She wants to hear what he hopes, and thinks, and dreams, and she wants to give that to him if she can. She wants to be there when he leaves, and she wants him to be there when she comes back.
And if there is a chance—if there was any chance, any ability for her apology to mean something to him, even if it is only for him to reject her, that final rejection giving him closure—she needs it. She needs to offer it in full—with open hands, with steadier feet—this first and last time.
She doesn’t deserve his forgiveness, but how she wants it.
Lili slides open her phone, shaking fingers. She taps through to Amina’s contact.
