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“What happened to her?”
“She left me.” I feel my chest tighten up as I remember. “I came home—I’d been gone a while, and she didn’t know where I was. I found a note saying she’d left. My dog fucking died for her, and she left me.”
“You never told me about that.”
“It was right before we left,” I say as I take a breath to calm myself. I don’t want to give Mark a lot of details. “She was…well, there was an intruder in the apartment. Odin tried to protect her and was shot.”
“Wow. That’s a loyal dog.”
“He was.”
“Finding a note is a difficult way to discover a relationship has ended,” Mark says. “You don’t get a chance to talk about it before the decision is made. Have you talked to her since?”
“No. I’m not going to, either. I can’t go back to that, and I don’t want to. She made the decision, but I’m respecting it.”
“Fair enough.”
“I just don’
t want to fuck up what I have now like I did the last time. I made a lot of mistakes, and I never really apologized for any of them. I didn’t care. I don’t want to be like that now.”
“What do you want, Evan?”
“I want to take it all back. I want to take back all the horrible shit I’ve done in my life and make it all disappear. I want to start all over.”
“You can’t make it all disappear like it never happened, Evan. You have to figure out how to live with the consequences of your actions. You can learn from them—make sure they don’t happen again—but you can’t take them back. Some actions are simply irrevocable.”
Mark leans forward and places his hand on my arm.
“However, you can still start over.”
Mark finishes up his paperwork and schedules some time with me for tomorrow. As soon as he leaves, there’s a figure in the shadows along the wall. I watch as Ralph approaches the end of my bed.
His expression is different. When I’ve seen him before, he’s always looked either sad or angry. This time he looks…proud.
“You are different now, you know,” he says.
“Am I?”
“Can’t you tell?” He sits down on the stool and spins side to side. He looks more childlike than he ever has before.
“Maybe.” I crumple one of the used up tissues in my hand, squeezing it in my fist. “If I leave that part of me behind though…what’s left?”
“Someone better.”
I stare at him and notice him becoming more and more transparent as we speak.
“I think I’m done with you,” Ralph says. He stands up and walks over to the window.
“So that’s it?” I ask. “You just disappear?”
“You don’t need me anymore.”
“Why did I need you in the first place?”
He smiles and shakes his head slowly.
“You’ve lost what you needed to lose. The question is what have you gained?”
