Page 159 of These Tears

‘So what shape is that?’ he asks, lifting my hand until the ring sits close to his face. The cubic zirconia catches the sunlight, throwing a hard little glint between us.

I stare at the scratched silver around it. My mind flips through meanings, but none truly settles.

‘Sometimes, it takes the shape of insufficiency,’ I murmur, pressure already building behind my lids. His gaze holds on my face, but I keep mine on the ring. ‘Sometimes, ignorance. Gullibility. But I think I keep it to remind me I’m not that person any more. You know… naïve, silly, complacent. Ugly.’

He doesn’t speak or move for several heartbeats. When he lets go of my hand, it somehow feels heavier than it was. His own moves slowly, careful enough that I know he is giving me time to step away.

I don’t.

His knuckle grazes my chin, light as breath, and pushes against it until my face lifts by the smallest degree.

He doesn’t keep the contact.

Maybe because there was too much of it last time.

‘You’ve always been skilled at turning fiction into certainty,’ he says, forcing my eyes to meet his.

My jaw clamps tight around the words that want to break loose.

‘I’m working on it,’ I admit, though it tastes like chewing gravel.

I allow the moment to hold us for a beat, a strange little truce neither of us seems willing to disturb. And, finally, I step away.

‘What’s the shape of Elias Crane?’ I ask as I catch his crystalline gaze.

Something passes through him before he stills again. I watch his eyes clearing and narrowing as he looks down at his gloves, turning them over in his hands as though the answers are hidden in the seams.

I don’t expect him to answer. We are not friends – far from it, in fact.

‘What makes you think I’d ever want to talk about that with you?’ The wind brings the words back to me.

Turning at the waist, I accept the verdict and take advantage of the quiet. My camera snaps a shot of a pine branch barely holding a pile of snow.

‘I was… reluctant to apply for the programme,’ he says then. ‘Told Bex I’d show up just to prove I wasn’t fit to be around people.’

Weeks ago, I would have rushed to rescue the conversation and urge him on. Now I decide not to fill the silence and let him do it at his own pace.

He counts his breaths until he dares to say more.

‘Then the epitome of confidence walked into the visitation room.’

I whip my head around in mild surprise. The corners of his mouth twitch.

Confidence is definitely not what lived in me at that time, but I leave him with the assumption.

He leans back until he’s half-lying on the snowmobile, staring at the open sky. ‘I was a wreck. Nearly turned around the second that door opened.’

‘If it makes you feel better, I felt the same.’

We chuckle – barely; a soft ripple in the silence.

But the unease finds us again, and now he’s giving me that loaded look I still don’t know what to do with.

‘I decided I needed more of that confidence,’ he whispers, eyes sweeping the skyline as his tone strengthens. ‘So… the shape of Elias Crane, Jakob Halvorsen, is insufficiency, ignorance, gullibility, naïvety, complacency… and ugliness.’

My other hand releases the camera entirely until it comes against my stomach.

The wind moves gently around us, carrying the distant creak of trees as I wait for the familiar sting of my own words hurled back at me.