My eyes burned. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know that too.” There was no accusation in his voice. No performance. Just hurt, trying very hard to remain decent.
The quiet that followed wasn’t empty.
It was four years of dinners, trips, and half-made plans. A flea-market table. His sweaters on the back of my chair. My books on his nightstand. His patience. My distance. The hundreds of small ways we had both pretended a relationship could survive on kindness and logistics.
“I think I knew,” he said finally.
My throat tightened. “You did?”
“Not today. Not this call.” His voice went rough. “This feels like getting hit by a car, actually.”
A laugh almost broke out of me at the horribleness of it all. I pressed my fingers to my mouth until it passed. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for a second.”
I stopped.
Good for me.
“I knew eventually,” he said. “Or I was afraid eventually. I don’t know. You’ve been somewhere else for a long time, Cat. Before this assignment. I kept thinking if I waited, you’d come back.”
“Nate.”
“And maybe that was unfair to both of us.”
I closed my eyes.
The room was dark except for the light over the table.
The embassy phone was warm against my ear.
“I do love you,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I do. It just isn’t enough.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
It was a clean cut. No drama, no accusation. Just the blade going in exactly where it belonged.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
I looked around the room. A locked door. Thick windows. The embassy phone. And a dragon somewhere below me, holding the line, furious, and mine. I hadn’t decided what to call it yet.
“No,” I said.
The honesty surprised us both. Then I corrected it. “Not in the way you mean. I’m not in immediate danger. But this is bigger than I told you. I’m staying in Seattle. I can’t tell you the rest.”
“Can I do anything?”
“No.”
