“Are you okay?”
Her sad laugh breaks my heart. “Not really.”
Not knowing what to do, I default to being my grandmother. “Can I get you something? Tea? A snack?”
“You can come in.”
I do so timidly, feeling like I am encroaching on her privacy, both spatially and emotionally. When I find her curled up under her covers hugging her tear-stained pillow, she looks . . . broken. It’s a shock to see.
“I heard you crying. Do you want to talk?”
She sits up against the headboard and shrugs noncommittally, then pats the bed beside her. I accept her invitation.
“It’s David. I saw a picture of him with the other woman. I didn’t think I would see him because he hasn’t posted on his profile in years, but she tagged him. When I opened the app, it was just there, in my face, like the biggestFuck you.”
“Was it hard to see her?”
“Yeah. But it was harder to see that she’s pregnant.”
My next heartbeat spreads like ice water through my chest. “Tell me you’re lying.”
She reaches under the pillow and retrieves her phone, unlocking it and handing it to me. The anthropomorphized pile of garbage stands beside a woman who’s smiling ear to ear, holding a sonogram up to the camera.
“Jesus,” I breathe out.
“He knows I don’t want to have kids—told me from day one he didn’t either, and now . . . Fuck.” Bri starts crying again, and my chest wrenches.
There’s nothing I can say, no dark joke I can make to lighten a situation like this. He didn’t just cheat on her, he started a whole family behind her back. “I’m so sorry.”
She denies my sympathy with a shake of her head. “It’s just now hitting me how much he lied. For three fucking years, I loved him, and now I don’t even know who he is. He’s making me question my worth, and I hate that I gave him that power over me.”
She clings to me, fingertips gripping my bicep and palm while she cries onto my shoulder. My eyes burn with empathetic tears. It is physically painful to see someone as strong as her fall apart over someone so far beneath her. I wish I had done something to ease her hurt before now rather than letting her shift so much of her focus to me.
“I almost called Natalie,” I tell on myself.
“Why?”
“Same shit. Even though Iknowshe doesn’t want me, I still love her, and I miss her.” In the short time I’ve shared with Bri, I’ve learned to recognize my bad habits.
“We need to block them,” she says suddenly. There’s a dissociated look in her eyes. She is lost in the emotional abscess left by the people who pushed us away.
“You think so?”
“Yes,” she says. “We’re going to take two steps forward, then see one of their posts or accidentally text them and feel like shit all over again.”
She’s right. Like always. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
We take out our phones, scooting closer together so we can see both of our screens. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Side by side, we both tap Block. The conversations go away. We do the same with app after app, deleting text messages and comments, until all that’s left is calls and texts.
“We should block their numbers too, right?” she asks. Hesitation sets in for both of us.
My stream of texts to Natalie is pathetic. Back-to-back messages receiving only a one-sentence response, yet I still didn’t see the lack of reciprocation, the one-sidedness of affection.
Part of me fears not being able to hear from Natalie at all, as if there would be an emergency or life change that would requiremeto be the person there for her, but she started a new life on her own. She pushed me away. She left me. This is the period at the end of a sentence she wrote for us both.
