“Let me go,” I say. “I think I got something really wrong today, and I gotta go look at it.”
“Then go look.” Like it's easy. Like it's a thing you just decide. He learned that from somebody. Probably me. “And call me when you figure it out. You’re not alone, remember?”
“Yeah.” My throat's shot. “Yeah, I remember.”
I hang up, take the phone, and turn the brightness of the screen all the way up for the first time since the hallway. There are a million notifications, but only one I care about.
Missed call. Missed call. Missed call. And under them, one message, from her.
Adams: It wasn't a no. I froze. It was never a no. Please.
I read it again. And again.
And the words gut me.
Because I didn't lose everything tonight.
I threw away the one thing that was trying to stay.
Jasmine
He hasn't answered…all day.
I know because I’ve checked my phone four hundred times since I sent the text, a number I would be embarrassed by if I had any embarrassment left. I used the last of it in my father's office, frozen, while the best thing in my life walked out the door.
I don't sleep.
I sit on my apartment floor with my back against the couch, and I do the thing I'm good at. I make a list. Except this time the list isn't reasons not to. This time it's a plan. For once, the list isn't a fortress. It's a door.
I write three things.
One: find out if he's really gone or just needs a minute.
Two: save the Carolina contract he set himself on fire for.
Three: stop being a person things happen to.
The next morning, I drive to his apartment, because I have to know which kind of gone he is. His truck isn't in the lot. I have a key now, because he gave it to me a week ago without either of us making a thing of it, and I let myself in, and the place is so empty it knocks the wind out of me.
The fridge, unplugged, the cord still coiled on the counter. The second plate in the rack, washed and set beside the first. The one cardboard box he finally cracked open, books mostly, stacked straight on the floor because he never got around to a shelf. A guy who has lived out of boxes for so long started setting things down in this one, on purpose, like he meant to stay a while. I know I'm the reason. I know exactly why he did it.
There's a sticky note on the dead refrigerator, in his blocky, left-handed handwriting. SUGAR'S IN THE CABINET, it says. THE GOOD KIND. And under it, smaller, like he wrote it and couldn't help himself: in case you ever just need a place that's quiet.
He gave me a key to a quiet place. That's everything that Caleb Adams is right there. He held off telling me he loved me for weeks, but he said it in everything that wasn't words, and my pathetic ass stood frozen in an office and let him walk out the door believing none of it had counted for anything.
I peel the note off the fridge and put it in my pocket, next to a bent paper clip I never did give back. Two pieces of junk worth half a cent between them, but the two most valuable things I own.
I lock the apartment behind me on my way out, and as the lock clicks, the gravity of what’s just happened hits me.
Caleb didn't leave because he hates me or stopped loving me. He left because he loves me, and he’s never once in his life been shown that love is a thing that stays. His father taught him to run. My father taught me to disappear. We are two people handed the exact same lie by the exact people who were supposed to know better, and we found each other anyway, and then, unconsciously, we both did the only thing we were ever taught to do.
I'm done doing the thing I was taught to do.
I drive to the rink, and I don’t go to my quiet six a.m. ice. I go to my father's office instead, and I don’t knock.
“We need to talk about Caleb's release,” I say.
My father looks up from his desk, tired, older than he was yesterday. “Jasmine”
