Her eyes searched mine—braced for my reaction and vulnerable. “It’s anonymous. I pitch my voice lower, slow it down a little, and use a modulator. It’s just stories. Observations.Things I have on my mind and don’t always say out loud. Like journaling but saying it loud instead.”
“How long?”
“A while. I’d do it whenever Travis was out, and I used to do it almost every night here. But not for a while.”
“And the text?”
“They said they missed it.” Her voice cracked faintly on the last word, thin as a reed.
“Is this connected to what’s been troubling you? To Matt? To the panic attack?”
“Part of it.” She spoke in soft fragments—the sighting at the riverbank, narrating live without thinking, the file erased from her laptop as if it had never existed. “Matt’s on it. He says it’ll be okay.”
“Then you will be. I trust him. Always have.” I studied the faint freckles scattered across her nose. “Areyouokay?”
“I will be.” Her eyes found mine again, softer, almost liquid in the low light. “You’re here.”
“Then what are you really afraid of?” I asked, voice low. “If it’s not that?”
A small, trembling laugh escaped her, not amusement; she was nervous. “You don’t waste time.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Everything,” She looked down at the worn floor between us. “I’m scared of needing you. Of needing anyone, really. I can be too much. I don’t want to drag anyone down.”
The raw honesty sliced through me. “Needing someone isn’t a weakness, Becca.”
“It feels like it when they leave.” Quiet. Factual. Carved from years of proof. From her parents and Travis.
I stepped closer until the warmth of her body brushed mine. “I didn’t leave. And I won’t.”
“We drifted apart,” she whispered.
“You pulled back,” I corrected gently. “But I let you. We were young. Then life happened. You had Travis.” His name hung heavy, but without bitterness.
“You were okay without me,” she said, turning away, fingers threading through her hair so the strands lifted and fell like dark water, and her hair tie fell to the ground, unheeded. “God, none of this is coming out right. I’m not blaming you. I’m not trying to be accusatory.”
“Becca.” I kept my voice low, steady as a heartbeat. “It’s not your fault either. We’ve both learned to stand alone. That’s not the question now. The question is whether you want to keep standing there by yourself.”
Her breath hitched audibly. “I don’t want to need someone and then discover I was wrong about them,” she murmured.
This wasn’t only about me. That was every door that had closed behind someone she loved. I reached for her hand—slow enough she could pull away. She didn’t. Her fingers were cool at first, then warmed quickly in mine.
“You’re not wrong about me,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to rebuild your whole world around me tonight. I’m asking you to stop pretending you don’t want me standing beside you in it.”
Her grip tightened, small but sure. “That’s different.”
“Yeah. It is.”
The quiet stretched, soft as the lamplight pooling around us.
“I don’t say things I don’t mean,” I told her. “And I don’t make drunken proposals or crawl through windows for people I’m only halfway about.”
A tiny smile flickered across her lips, there and gone. “I believe you.”
“Then let me push you a little,” I said quietly. “Can I?”
Her eyes searched mine.
