I askedSimone and Raschad to keep Micah for me, and sent Julian a text.
come over tonight?
He responded inside of thirty seconds.
JULIAN
What time?
Seven-thirty.
JULIAN
I’ll be there.
He was at my door at seven-twenty-eight on the dot. His face was composed, but his eyes looked tired. I stepped back and let him in.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He came in and stood in my foyer with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
“Will you come sit?”
We sat on the couch. Not close — the careful distance of two people who had not been in a room together in seventy-two hours and were not yet sure how the room was going to behave.
He looked at me andwaited.
“Julian.”
“Yes?”
“I owe you an apology.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t look away. He didn’t sayno you don’t.He let me have the room.
“I reacted badly.” I looked at him. “I’ve been thinking about it for three days. The words I used. The way I used them.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Julian. You did a thing that maybe scared me, and I responded to my fear and not to you. When the car appeared, the part of me that’s been protecting me for years grabbed the wheel before the part of me that knows you could get there. And I’ve been sitting with what I did for three days.”
He looked down.
“I’m sorry you’ve spent days thinking I see you as the kind of man who handles women. That your motives are anything but loving. Because I don’t think that.”
He took a deep breath. “Alyssa.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for that. For what it’s worth, I didn’t handle it well either. I said something I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry too.”
“It stung. But the truth is, you weren’t wrong.”
“There were better ways to have said it. So again — I’m sorry.”
“Julian. This is my apology, not yours.”
