Page 45 of His Wall

"I know you should."

He picked up the wine again. He turned the glass on the cloth a quarter-turn. He looked at me with a patient face.

"For old times' sake," I said. "I won't."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me, Rafael."

He nodded once. He took a drink. He set the glass down.

The food came. We ate. He told me about his case in Boston. Three weeks of paperwork on a financial fraud. I asked the right questions. He answered them. He asked me about my dog, the one I had not had since I was twenty-six, and I told him I still did not have one. He smiled. He remembered I did not have a dog. He asked anyway.

Halfway through the carbonara, he set his fork down.

"Why did you end it, Leah?"

"I didn't end it."

"Leah. You stopped answering my calls. You moved apartments. You transferred units. You faded me out."

"I didn't."

"What would you call it?"

I did not have an answer.

I had never officially broken it off. I just stopped. I stopped in the hospital, a little, when I sat by his bed for forty-eight hours, and the surgeon said the words severed and liver and grateful. I stopped more in the weeks after, when he came home and could not lift his left arm above shoulder height, and I had to help him put on a T-shirt. I could not look at the long pink line that would become a scar. I stopped completely six weeks later when I put in for the transfer to long-term embeds. I stopped calling him on Sunday mornings, and he stopped calling me back. One day, I moved out of the apartment we had not officially moved into together, and he had not been at the new address.

I disappeared.

I let him become my past tense without telling him.

My throat closed.

"I don't know what to call it."

"It's okay."

"It's not okay."

"It's okay, Leah. It was a long time ago. I'm not asking you to call it anything."

He picked up his wine. He took a small drink. He set the glass down.

"I'm not angry. I was, for a while. The anger burned out. What's left is simpler."

"Rafael — "

"I missed you. I still do."

I looked at the breadbasket. I could not look at his face when he said that.

He waited.

He was very good at waiting. He had always been very good at waiting.

"I forgave you a long time ago, Leah. You haven't caught up. Not even close."