“I never wanted you to feel erased,” he whispered.
Heat rolled through me, scorching but tender.
I wanted him. I wantedthis.This honesty. This closeness. This terrifying, beautiful vulnerability.
The duck cooled untouched between us. And for the first time in forever, we weren’t drifting. We were holding the same thread from opposite ends. Pulling ourselves back to each other, inch by tentative inch.
The honesty didn’t fix everything. But it could. If we let it.
The check came and went, neither of us reaching for it fast enough to prove anything. Adrian slid the black billfold aside, and for a second, we just sat there in the glow of the red lanterns, breathing the same air and pretending dessert-sized prophecies weren’t waiting to ambush us.
The server dropped two fortune cookies on the table. Westared at them as if they were ticking.
Adrian huffed a soft, humorless laugh. “Go ahead,” he said, nodding toward mine. “You always crack yours first.”
“Only because you pretend not to care about yours,” I countered, “but then you analyze the hell out of it on the drive home.”
His lips twitched. “Please. I do not?—”
“Yes, you do,” I said, already reaching. “You annotate them as if they’re lab results.”
He leveled a look at me that said,shut up,but there was warmth under it. Love that had kept me sane even when he didn’t know he was keeping me anything.
I broke the cookie with a crisp snap. The slip of paper slid out shyly. I unfolded it carefully.
Adrian watched me closely, waiting for the universe to personally send him a message through my dessert.
“Well?” he asked.
I swallowed and read. “It says, ‘What you fear losing is already on its way back to you.’”
His breath faltered—not dramatic, not cinematic, just a tiny, involuntary stutter in his chest that hit me almost as hard as his reasons for abandoning our marriage.
He didn’t speak, and for once, the silence was his. Adrian picked up his cookie like a man approaching a wild animal.
“Fine,” he murmured, cracking it open. “Let’s see which server in the back is messing with us.”
He unfolded his fortune, eyes dropping to the slip of paper. His expression changed, barely, but unmistakably. A softening. A quiet bomb imploding in his chest.
I leaned in. “Adrian?”
He didn’t look up immediately. Finally, he exhaled and read aloud.
“Someone you love still wants you to try.”
The words hung between us like a held breath. Adrian set the slip of paper down very carefully, as if it might break.
His voice was low when he said, “Eli…?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
He didn’t ask the question out loud.He didn’t need to.
I slid my hand across the table, and he met me halfway, fingers brushing mine as if he was afraid I’d vanish.
“Trying is what we’re doing,” I said. “Tonight. Tomorrow. As long as it takes.”
His eyes closed for a moment, and I could read relief, grief, love, and fear in his expression, everything mixing at once, too much and not enough.
