I know. It changes nothing.
I drove back to Sofia's and sat in my apartment, surrounded by crocheted doilies and ceramic cats, and the silence of a place that had always felt like enough until recently. The hideous lamp cast its usual pink glow across the room. Overhead in the main house, Sofia's radio murmured.
I didn't sleep. I couldn't.
When five AM rolled around, I gave up trying, made coffee, and sat at the small table with my phone face down in front of me. I'd picked it up four times during the night to call her. Put it down four times.
There was nothing I could say that would cover what I'd done, and saying the wrong thing would only make it worse.
I'd been in tighter spots than this. That was the thing I kept coming back to, sitting there in the dark with cold coffee and Sofia's ceramic cats judging me from the shelf.
Not tighter in the way anyone would want to compare. But I knew what it was to stand in a bare concrete room at two in the morning, heart going, waiting for a door to open.
I knew what it felt like to be genuinely afraid and do it anyway, because the alternative was watching everything fall apart and knowing I'd had a chance and hadn't taken it. The street fights hadn't made me brave. They'd stripped everything else away until the only thing left was a choice. Move or don't. That was all it ever was.
The difference was that back then I'd been fighting out of desperation. Out of a twenty-two-year-old's blind, stupid refusal to let his mother die without trying everything. I hadn't been thinking about courage. I'd been thinking about how expensive those treatments were.
This was different. This required something I hadn't needed then, because then I'd had nothing to lose. Now I did.
And it was what kept me from picking up the phone.
The hardest thing I'd ever done down a filthy back alley wasn't getting hit. It was stepping forward when every instinct said stay back. Lifting my foot and moving it. That was the whole thing. Everything else followed from that.
It was something I knew how to do with my eyes shut, often thanks to the other guy's knuckles.
Now I had to figure out when.
I sat with that for a while. The lamp hummed. Sofia's radio went quiet upstairs.
At six-fifteen, Sofia knocked.
Much as I didn't want to let her in, experience told me resistance was useless. She took one look at me, went to my kitchen, and started making eggs without asking. I didn't have the energy to argue.
"It’s over," I said, because Sofia would find out eventually, and I preferred to control the narrative.
"I know. I heard. Then I saw your face," she said, cracking eggs into the pan. She didn't look up. "What did you do?"
"Told her it might have been a mistake."
Sofia made a sound that conveyed both disappointment and the complete absence of surprise. "Stupido," she said, not unkindly. "You are built for speed, yes? But not always in the right direction."
She put a plate in front of me. I ate because refusing Sofia's food required more fight than I had in me.
"She's a good woman," Sofia said, settling across from me with her own coffee. "The sort you don't find twice."
"I know that."
"Then why are you sitting here?"
I didn't have an answer for that. Or rather, I had too many answers, none of which sounded like anything other than fear dressed up in better clothes.
Sofia studied me over the rim of her cup. "My husband, he was scared too. When he first came to this country, he had nothing. No English, no money, no family here. He almost didn't ask me out because he thought I deserved someone with more to offer."
She set her cup down. "I would have missed forty years with the best man I ever knew."
She patted my hand with her papery fingers and left me with the dishes.
I called Malakai at eight.
