Not goodbye. Later. And that word followed me all morning like something warm and slightly inconvenient. Later, while I stood in the shower, smiling into the steam like a complete idiot for no reason I was willing to examine too closely. Later, while Cassie stared at me over her coffee cup, one eyebrow raised to a height that suggested genuine architectural concern.
“You are glowing,” she said. “Which is concerning because I know what caused it. And now I need bleach for my imagination and possibly my entire memory.”
I stared at those three texts—their clipped, basic words—long enough for the screen to dim itself out of embarrassment on my behalf.
He didn’t call last night like he said he would.
I told myself he was tired. That work ran late and Rainer needed him for something. That cars break down at inconvenient hours. That engines throw tantrums and grown men spend entire evenings under hoods, swearing at bolts. I told myself a lot of sensible shit. The kind you tell yourself when the alternative is admitting that the silence has a shape, that it’s familiar, that you’ve felt it before, and that it cost you everything it had to take.
Morning came.
My phone lit up at seven-twelve.
Zane:Sorry. Something came up and I’m handling it.
I stared at the message until the words stopped looking like words and began to feel like little black hooks.
Something came up and I’m handling it.
I hate that phrase with a specific, well-documented fury that has only deepened over the years spent watching men deploy it as if it were a full explanation rather than a politely slammed door in your face. It sounds clean. Responsible. Manly in that particular chest-puffing way that men seem to genuinely believe is attractive rather than infuriating.
I’m handling it.
Translation for women who have spent years learning the language of emotionally constipated men: sit quietly, ask nothing, and trust that whatever he is not telling you is somehow for your own good.
Well, fuck that.
I have already lived through one version of Zane deciding what I needed to know and what I did not. I know exactly what it costs. I’m aware of its shape, its weight, and the specific, particular way it hollows a person out from the inside. I am not doing that again. Not a second time. Not after that night when his hands were on my face and his voice said things I had waited years to hear. Not after what he said and what I said back.
I set my phone face down on the cushion beside me and stare at it as if it has personally offended me.
Cassie watches me from the kitchen. She is eating cereal straight from the box, wearing her oversized black jumper and socks with tiny skulls on them. Her eyeliner from last night is smudged under one eye.
Her gaze moves from my face to the phone, then back to my face.
“For the record,” she says, “you can stop glaring at your phone.”
“I’m not glaring.”
“You absolutely are glaring. That phone is one wrong vibration away from filing for a restraining order.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Do you have anything useful to say?”
“Usually no.” She shoves a handful of cereal into her mouth and crunches, the unbothered confidence of a woman who has never once in her life respected a silence she did not create. “Today maybe. Are we mad at Rivera, worried about Rivera, or pretending we are above both while emotionally waterboarding your screen?”
“I’m fine.”
Cassie stops chewing.
That is never a good sign. Cassie stopping mid-cereal is the conversational equivalent of a weather alert.
She lowers the box. “Sky.”
“What?”
“Do not insult me in my own kitchen before coffee has properly entered my bloodstream. You know what fine means when it comes out of your mouth. Fine means the building is on fire and you have decided to stand there and watch the flames.”
“I’m not insulting you.”
