I call Trevor and apologize for disappearing without warning, assuring him The Ember project won’t suffer, and meaning every word of it. He is gracious in the easy way Trevor always is. Victoria Chen is considerably less gracious, but professionally so. That particular cool precision of a woman who expects commitments to be honored and has every right to expect it. Apologizing, I promise to deliver and agree to continue working remotely, liaising by video call until figuring out what comes next.
My days consist of working, taking walks, and having coffee with Annie every single morning. The familiarity of Vixen Falls doesn’t fit the way it used to. The particular comfort of a place that I used to feel is no longer there.
Standing in the café on the corner one morning, the one where Ryan and I had coffee on Sunday mornings, the one with the table by the window that we’d claimed as ours, I order the usual and look out at the familiar street, feeling something inside that isn’t here at all. The desert is sitting in me likesomething I’d carried home without knowing. The wide open sky of Nevada. The dry clean heat of it. The particular quality of a morning coming gold through floor-to-ceiling windows with the mountains in the distance, Memphis at my feet, and Tate somewhere in the house, his voice carrying from the kitchen.
My house, something says quietly inside me.
I don’t push it away.
Just let it be there.
Every morning, I pick up the phone, see his name, and put it back down. Every night, I lie in the dark and feel those two calls sitting there, unanswered, waiting, like something with weight pressing against the screen. I tell myself I’m not ready, I need more time, and a lot of things get less convincing with every day that passes.
On the fourth day, I pick up the phone and press play.
One voicemail.
Sophia. I don’t know why you left. I don’t know what happened.
A pause that feels like something being weighed very carefully.
But I need to talk to you, in person. There are things I need to tell you, and they can’t be done over the phone.
A longer pause.
Please come back.
A beat.
I miss you.
The voicemail ends.
Lying there with the phone held against my chest and feeling those three words sitting in me—’I miss you’—said quietly andwithout performance by a man who does not say things he doesn’t mean and never has.
I play it again.
And again.
By the fourth time, I’m crying properly, quietly, the particular tears of someone who has been holding something at arm’s length for days and has finally run out of arm and reasons.
‘He chose you,’ Annie had said. ‘Not her. You.’
I lie there for a long time after. Then, I reach for my laptop, open it, and book the first available flight to Vegas.
I think about calling him, sitting on the edge of the bed with my thumb over his name, the flight confirmation glowing on my screen. I feel the pull of it, the need to hear his voice, to tell him I am coming so he’d know, so he’d be there, so I wouldn’t have to walk into that house not knowing what waited for me.
Then, I put the phone down.
Because if I call him, I’ll say everything that needs to be said in person, the things that deserve to be said, looking at his face, standing in the house that has become mine without me deciding it would, with Memphis between us, the desert outside the windows, and all of it around us.
He deserves that.
He deserves me showing up.
Not a phone call.
Me.
