It’s the rejection.
It’s the fact that if I let Chase go, I will be alone and alone means I will have to face Blue Golding in his backward hat in his kitchen and let him look at me — or, worse, not look at me — and I will know, finally, what it actually means.
Which is that he doesn’t want me.
That is the part that has been keeping me here.
That is the part I have not been brave enough to say out loud.
Behind me, Mila stops at the corner. Her voice comes ringing down the street, half-laughing, half-warning, full of the kind of love that has been carrying me for years.
“You’re doing it!” she shouts.
I turn.
She’s small under the streetlamp, hair flying, one hand cupped around her mouth.
“I’m so serious, Melly!”
I lift my hand, and she lifts hers back, and we stand there for a long moment on opposite ends of the same block, her at the corner under the lamp and me half a street away in the dark, and for the first time in two years, the thought of breaking up with Chase doesn’t feel impossible.
It feels, for the first time, like a thing I might one day be able to do.
I drop my hand.
I turn.
I walk with Penelope to our place through the cold.
I fall onto my stomach on my bed and FaceTime Chase. He picks up almost right away, but he doesn’t look at the phone.
“Hey, babe,” I say into the pillow. “I just got home from the study group. I’m going to go to sleep, so I thought I’d call to say goodnight.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s in his bedroom. I can see the corner of the dresser, and he’s looking somewhere above the phone. The TV, maybe. His laptop. Anywhere but at me.
“Chase?”
He looks at the camera.
His face is etched with annoyance, and as soon as I see it, my stomach starts to fold itself up under my ribs.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
He shifts. The phone moves with him. He’s walking. He crosses his room, and he sits down on the edge of his bed, and the camera resettles. Now I can see his whole face.
“You tell me, Melly.”
“What?”
He sighs deeply. “What are we doing?”
My stomach twists.
“Well.” I try a small smile. “I’m calling to tell you goodnight.”
He shakes his head. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
I do.
