And for the second time, I tuck myself into their tiny second-floor bathroom with the water running and sob into my knuckles, because I know I can’t take him back to San Francisco.
Know I can’t bear to be the person who takes him away from where he belongs.
When I tell him I think he should stay while his mom recovers from her fall, he studies me for a long time. “Are you sure?”
“One hundred percent,” I say.
We agree he’ll stick around for a month while he, Michael, and Lou work out a long-term plan.
I fly home alone. As soon as I step foot in the apartment, I feel the shift.
Somehow I know he will never live there again.
At first we talk all the time. Then we get busy. He’s catching up on the repair work that his dad hadn’t had the chance to finish. I’m exhausted from grueling days of scrubbing in and out to stand behind a ring of scrubbed-in surgeons and residents so thick I’m lucky if I get a glance at a scalpel. And when my intern friends bemoan that same experience over drinks, I pretend to agree when the truth is, even being tasked with a suture sounds like too much right now.
Lou has only one year left of her MFA in Iowa. Then she’ll move back to Montana. Wyn tells me this like it’s great news—“I’ll be home soon.”
You’re already home, I think. I wonder if I ever will be.
Cleo texts to ask how I’m holding up with Wyn away. I feel too guilty to say anything other than a variation on All good here. How are you?
I follow Taye to happy hours and trivia nights. I join her Bachelor viewing party too. But mostly I fill my spare time, snuggled in bed with a cup of tea and wearing Wyn’s old Mattingly sweatshirt, half watching and half sleeping through episodes of Murder, She Wrote.
The night before he’s supposed to visit, Gloria falls again and breaks her wrist, and he has to cancel. “It’s fine,” I tell him. “I was honestly going to be too tired for much this weekend anyway.”
We start missing calls. Sometimes I’m so tired I drift off on the couch while I’m waiting for the phone to ring. Sometimes he gets so lost in his work, he loses track of time. He’s always apologetic, beating himself up about it, promising to do better.
“Wyn,” I say. “It’s seriously fine. We’re both busy.”
I’m working over Christmas, so he plans to come the week after. His car skids off the road on the way to the airport. He’s uninjured, but he misses the flight. “I’ll come tomorrow,” he says.
Tomorrow is the only full day off I’ll have during his visit, and now he won’t get in until that evening. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds great.”
He’s in town thirty-six hours, and then he’s gone again.
A part of me still hopes that if I give him room, space, time, everything might be okay.
One night, after a last-minute video-chat cancellation, I decide to show up to the interns’ usual happy hour spot, and Taye and Grace aren’t there. “Grace had some family wedding in Monterey, and I think she took Taye,” Martin says.
Taye thrives in big social settings. She’s like Parth that way—so good at singling out the shiest or quietest or clumsiest person in the room and bringing them into the center of things. Probably why she took me under her wing.
I think nothing of it being just Martin and me that night. We stay for only one drink—I’m exhausted—and then he offers to drive me home.
When we get there, he insists on walking me to the door. I don’t think anything of this either. Because of Wyn. How many times did he suggest we meet Sabrina at her summer internship so she wouldn’t have to walk home by herself? How often did he give Cleo a ride to her car on the far side of the Mattingly campus?
On the stoop, Martin hugs me good night. Or that’s what I think he’s doing at first, and when I realize he isn’t, I’m so shocked I freeze.
Let the kiss happen to me. By the time I think to shove him backward, he’s already realized it was a mistake, that I wasn’t kissing him back. He looks embarrassed.
Which only intensifies my guilt. Did I give him some kind of sign? Was I flirting with him? I don’t know. A piercing pain starts behind my right eye. My brain feels like it’s sloshing around in my skull.
“I’m not . . . available,” I stammer. “You know that.”
Martin laughs. “The furniture guy?”
I feel like I’m going to be sick.
“Wyn,” I say.
“He’s not here, Harry,” Martin says. “He’s never here anymore. I am.”
I turn and run inside. I call Wyn immediately, even though it’s late here, which means it’s even later in Montana. It goes to voicemail. I call back, and he answers on the third ring, voice groggy.
I tell him everything, as fast as I can, poison I’m letting from my blood.
Afterward, I have to beg him to say something. When he does, his voice is hollow. “This isn’t working anymore.”
I want to take my plea back. I want to beg him not to say anything else.
I barely hear the rest of the call. Only snatches get through the raging of my heart.
. . . kids when we got together . . . different now . . . what’s best . . .
I don’t cry. It’s not real. He promised he would always love me. It can’t be real.
But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy, that I couldn’t give him the kind of love his parents had when my only education on the subject had been the one my parents had.
Two days after our call, my stuff shows up. No note. I don’t tell anyone. I can’t bear to say it.
29
REAL LIFE
Friday
EVERYONE IS IN their respective corners of the house, getting ready for the bachelorette-slash-bachelor-party night Parth and Sabrina have planned.
I should be getting ready too. Instead, my mind keeps wandering back to that dark ledge I’ve spent months turning away from. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look. The pain is too much. It will suck me into itself, and I’ll never get back out.
Let it go, I tell myself.
It doesn’t matter that I never got concrete answers about what broke us. What matters is that we broke. What matters is that Wyn’s happy with his new life.
We’ll make it through tomorrow, then go our separate ways. When we tell everyone we’ve broken up, we’ll be able to say it was amicable, that it won’t cost them anything.
But I can’t let it go.
I’ve been trying for months, and I’m no closer to peace. Here’s my opportunity—my last chance. It might be a mistake to get answers, but if I don’t, I’ll spend my life regretting it.
This is what I need from this week, the thing that will justify the torture.
I leave the bedroom, march down the hall past the hiss of running showers and old pipes creaking in the walls.
Everything feels strange, dreamlike: the time-smoothed wooden stairs soft against my soles, the prickle of cool air as I step out back, the rushing sound of the tide sliding over the rocks beneath the bluff. I cross the patio to the side gate, still open from Cleo’s sudden flight of fancy the other night, and follow the path beyond it, into the dense evergreens beyond.