Page 135 of Ruthless Claim

At around two a.m., I finally stop kidding myself that I’m going to fall asleep. At seven, I pick up my half-dead phone.

Don’t call her. She won’t answer. Don’t call her you idiot.

I call her.

It rings endlessly until her voicemail picks up. You’ve reached Valentina Brennan, and I hang up before the beep. I don’t know what I’d say. I genuinely don’t know what words exist for this.

I try again at nine. Voicemail again.

I text her. I know you don’t want to hear from me. I know I have no right to ask you for anything. I’m sorry. I need you to know that.

It’s not enough. It doesn’t even come close to enough, but I send it anyway.

The text sends and the bubble is blue so at least she hasn’t blocked me.

Unless she had forgotten all about that until I fucking texted her.

Unable to stand these four walls, I escape to the bathroom for no reason other than it’s a different room from my phone and being in a different room is marginally easier than lying on that bed watching it not light up.

I shower and put on yesterday’s clothes because that’s all I have.

I go downstairs to get out of my room.

The restaurant is one of those hotel breakfast places that tries very hard to be fancy.

White tablecloths.

A little flower on every table.

A man in a suit at the buffet carefully selecting a single piece of melon.

There’s a family in the corner with two kids—the younger one is maybe three, banging a spoon on the table.

His father reaches over without looking and gently moves the spoon, but the kid immediately picks it back up.

The mother is reading something on her phone and laughing at it, and she turns the screen to show her husband.

He leans over and reads it and he laughs too.

Then they both look at their kids, this quick private look between them that means: look at this. Look at what we have.

I look away.

I order eggs and coffee and I burn my throat on the coffee. I don’t touch the eggs.

The table next to me has two women sharing a pot of tea, both of them reaching for it at the same time, one of them saying sorry, go ahead, and the other saying no you, and they both laugh.

The man in the suit comes back from the buffet with a plate that is mostly berries and an expression like he’s already regretting the melon.

The kid with the spoon has escalated to a fork.

She would have taken my coffee this morning.

She always took mine.

Every single morning since we stopped pretending the exchange was anything other than what it was, she makes hers and I make mine and she takes mine and leaves hers and I drink hers. It was our thing.

Something that existed in the specific language we’d built for ourselves, the one that didn’t need words.