She keeps talking.
About circling each other.
About waiting.
About convincing herself it wasn’t anything.
A hollow laugh leaves me before I can stop it. It sounds wrecked, and I don’t recognize it as mine. Her voice changes when she talks about the porch. It softens, but there’s steel threaded through it, something resolved and fragile at the same time.
“He kissed me in the kitchen…”
My eyes close hard enough that light bursts behind them. I can feel that night like it never ended. The dishes in the sink. Our closeness. Her breath against mine. Her hands gripping my shirt, as if she were bracing for impact.
‘He said he needed three more days…’
My chest pulls tight, sharp enough that I have to lean my shoulder back against the wall to stay upright.Three days.I remember counting them down like they were oxygen.
The recording shifts. Cloth brushing the mic, and some kind of beeping sounds in the background that I can’t decipher.
She keeps going.
About fear.
About timing.
About all the ways she talked herself out of wanting me.
Something inside me twists. Not anger or regret, but something more helpless than either.
Then she confirms it.‘I love him.’
The words don’t land softly. They slam into me with the force of something undeniable and final. My legs give before I can stop them, and I slide down the wall, the concrete scraping the back of my jumpsuit as I hit the floor.
I don’t even feel it.
The recording continues…
She talks about me being in a cell.
About not saying it back.
About being too late.
My hands brace on my knees, and my head drops forward. I stare at the floor because it’s theonly thingin the room that isn’t shifting under the weight of what she’s saying.
‘And now he’s in a jail cell thinking I don’t love him!’
Something inside my chest fractures, and I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth.It doesn’t fucking help.
Her voice breaks. Completely. There’s no composure left, no careful management, only grief, exhaustion, and love stripped down to its rawest form.
I have heard Millie cry before.
But I haveneverheard her sound like this.
The beeping keeps its indifferent rhythm.
The world keeps moving forward, as if nothing monumental just changed.
