Not with his usual precision. Just sat, the way you sat when something had been holding you up and had temporarily stopped.
“Wesley. Let’s talk.”
28
Icrossed the room and sat across from him.
We were quiet for a moment.
"You didn't text me," I said. Quieter now. The anger had gone somewhere in the last twenty minutes and what was left was just the thing underneath it.
"I didn’t," he said.
"For four days."
"I know."
I put my hands on the counter. "I get that you didn't know what to say. I get that you were—" I gestured at the apartment, at the general situation, at the direction his parents had just left in. "Clearly dealing with things. But I was on a couch. Thinking about your lanyard. I could have helped.”
"I know," he said.
“I wanted to help.”
I could tell that Nathan was thinking about how to respond.
"I don't—" He stopped. Started again. "Emotions are not—" Another stop. "This is not something I've ever been good at. Saying things. Feeling things and then saying them to another person." He looked at his hands. "I've been alone for thirty-five years, Wesley. Not by accident. Not because nobody was available. By—" He paused. "By design. It was easier. It required less of me. I built everything around it."
The apartment was very quiet.
"And then you," he said. To his hands. "And I don't have the system for it. I don't have the framework. I have—" He stopped. "I have thirty-five years of not doing this. I didn't text you because I didn't know how to do it correctly and so I didn't do it at all." He looked up. "Which is wrong. I know it's wrong. I knew it was wrong every day I didn't do it." A pause. "I'm working on it."
I just looked at him for a long moment, and something in my chest went quiet in a way it hadn't been quiet for four days.
"Tell me now," I said. "What happened. All of it."
He told me.
The leave of absence. Three months minimum. Paid—he said that specifically, which meant someone had been decent about it somewhere in the process. The investigation, the review process, the conditions. He said it the way he said everything, clinical and precise, no editorializing. I listened without interrupting, which was new for me, which I was getting better at.
When he finished I said: "You reported yourself."
"Yes."
"Before anyone asked."
"Yes."
I sighed. "You didn't have to do that."
"Yes," he said, with the expression he used when I was saying something he fundamentally disagreed with and was choosing the precise words to say so. "I did."
"There's no way anyone would have—"
"I knew the assessment was wrong when I made it," he said. "I made it anyway. That goes on the record. That's not a negotiation."
"I pushed you into it," I said. "I said it was Dylan. I said my parents were watching. I—"
"You asked," he said. "I said yes. The decision was mine. You don't get to carry that."
