"The bet is real," he says at last. "It's ugly, and I'll answer for every inch of it. But you have the bones of it wrong." He takes one step closer. "Five other rich idiots at a card table, months before you ever raised that paddle. Not one of them knows your name. Not one of them knows you exist. There was never an audience, Darcy. Nobody was watching us. Nobody laughed.There's no punchline, because there was never a joke. You were never part of any game, and you were never the punchline of anything."
Every word lands somewhere inside me that's been bleeding since this afternoon. I want to believe him. I want to believe him so badly I have to wrap my arms around myself to hold myself in place in my chair.
"Tomorrow is just a meeting in Colorado," he says. "Not a moving van. And I didn't come here to say goodbye. Whatever you think tonight is, it isn't that."
I had a hundred answers ready for a gentle goodbye. I have nothing for this. The hope surges again, bigger, and this time I can't kill it, and it terrifies me. Hoping is how I get left.
And then he runs out of words.
I watch it happen. He shifts his weight. Pushes a hand through his hair, then doesn't seem to know what to do with the hand. In these past weeks I have never once seen him reach for what to say next and come up empty, and watching it now does more to me than the whole speech did. There's no show tonight. There's just us, and the chasm neither of us seems to know how to cross.
"I don't trust myself to do this right," he finally says. "If I wing it, I'll leave something out, and I can't leave anything out. Not tonight. You need to hear every word of what's in me—all of it, in the right order." He swallows. "So give me a minute. Just let me talk. Please."
He reaches into his jacket and takes out a folded sheet of notebook paper. When he unfolds the page against the lamplight, I can see through it before he says a word. Writing on both sides. Lines crossed out and rewritten. Corrections crowded into the margins.
My heart climbs into my throat. I know what a single written sentence costs this man. I've sat beside the fight. Yet every inch of that page is full of his words. Words he wrote for me.
My eyes burn. Not yet. I'm not letting go yet.
"I wrote this earlier today, before I came looking for you," he says, not quite meeting my eyes. "I didn't know if I'd get the chance to say what needs saying. I wasn't sure you'd want to hear me out. So I put it all down here. If everything else failed me tonight, I was going to leave this for you." He looks at the paper in his hands. "Even if I lose you tonight, these are the things I want you to know."
I don't say anything. I wait for him to hand the letter to me to read, but he holds onto it instead. He's going to read it. For me. In front of me.
He takes a halting breath, then he begins.
"Darcy. If you're reading this..." He stops right there. His jaw works. Because I'm not reading it. I'm sitting six feet away, watching him hold a page he wrote for a version of tonight where he never got to look at me while I heard it. When he starts again, his voice has dropped low. "If you're reading this, I didn't get the chance to say any of this to your face." His eyes come up to mine for a second. Then he finds his place again with his thumb.
He reads far more slowly than he talks, giving every word its own moment, and his voice has gone softer than I've ever heard it, all of his usual volume traded away for focus. This is what reading costs him.
"I have to start with the bet, because it's the ugliest thing and you deserve an explanation. It's real. The man who invented that stupid bet thought love was a game for losers, because losing was all he'd ever seen it do. That bet was started by a man I stopped being somewhere around the first week of being back home with you."
The words go through me and keep going. Somewhere in my chest, the oldest, meanest voice I own goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Listening.
"And even that isn't the whole truth." He stumbles on the next line, loses a word, backs up and takes it again. I don't breathe while he fights his way through. He wins. "The whole truth is that how I feel about you started way before any bet. It started back in school. I knew it then, and I refused to look at it for what it really was."
He turns the page over. His hands aren't steady. His hands are rarely unsteady, and they're shaking now, holding a page with my name at the top of it, and my tears stop waiting to fall. I let them roll down my cheeks and I don't wipe them away. I don't want him to stop.
"I'm sorry for what I did to you in school. I'm sorry for the years after, all of them. And I'm sorry you learned about the bet and about Colorado form..." He catches it and stops. "From," he corrects himself quietly. "From anyone's mouth but mine. You should have heard every word of it from me first. That one I'm going to be sorry about for a long time."
He doesn't explain. He doesn't excuse. He doesn't ask me to make it easier for him. I'm crying without any sound at all, and it's already enough. I didn't know an apology could be enough.
He pauses there like he's bracing, and I understand why with the next line.
"You're the only person I'm real with. Everybody else gets the show. You never bought the act from me once in your life, not even when you were thirteen. Being looked at is my whole job, Darcy. It never felt like being seen until it was you doing the looking."
Being seen is the thing I've guarded against my whole life. And here he is, telling me the seeing was the point.
"You found out the weakest thing about me and you made me bigger instead of smaller. I spent my life building a man nobody would ever doubt. You found the thing I buried and you didn't blink. You just taught me how to navigate though it..." A small pause while he stares the word down. "Throughit. Like it was any other day. Like I was worth teaching. I didn't know grace like that existed until you."
A sound comes out of me, small and wet, not quite a word. He doesn't look up. If he looks up, I think we both know he won't finish. He keeps going instead, slow and deliberate, hesitating in front of the longer words, gathering each one before he says it. He gets every single one.
"You're brave in ways I never will be. You fight for kids nobody else fights for. You built a dream out of a teacher's salary and pure stubbornness. You tell the truth even when your voice shakes. I jump out of airplanes for fun, but you are the bravest person I have ever known."
A few hours ago, alone in my apartment, I called myself a coward.
Now this. The bravest person he has ever known. Me. In his handwriting. In his voice. While he's doing the truly brave thing.
I press my fingers over my mouth and keep listening.
