Page 390

You wrote that you want me to enter the home you made after surviving Milwaukee.

The photographs helped.

I can see you there now. I can picture you and Briggs near those windows, your equipment spread across the floor after practice, books stacked beside your bed, and mezcal waiting in the kitchen for nights when neither of you knows how to say you need company.

You aren’t stranded anymore.

That matters to me more than I can explain.

The compass is my answer to Donne.

I don’t want either of us to become the fixed point while the other travels. I want us to become two people capable of finding one another from wherever we stand.

You told me every road still curves toward me.

Mine does too.

I am getting closer to being ready to hear your voice.

Wanting it no longer frightens me the way it did when these letters began. I can imagine hearing you laugh, argue with me, or say my name without immediately turning that moment into a promise about everything that follows.

I still don’t trust myself to hear you without wanting to rush across every mile between us.

That is the truth today.

The distance between wanting your voice and being ready for it no longer feels impossible to cross.

I will tell you when I am ready.

I promise I won’t hide inside the silence forever.

Charm

I read those final pages twice.

She wants my voice.

She hasn’t given me permission to use it yet.

The distinction hurts, but it doesn’t feel like rejection. Charm hasn’t disguised fear as certainty or offered another promise because she believes a promise will keep me from leaving. She has told me exactly where she stands and trusted me not to drag her across the remaining distance.

Her number remains inside my phone.

I have never deleted it, although there were nights when seeing her name hurt badly enough to make me consider throwing the entire device through a wall.

I reach for the phone before stopping myself.

The photograph of her bare ass remains beside the antique compass. Her loft, boutique, friends, jersey, and body surround the letter where she has finally admitted the road between us no longer feels impossible.

The clock reads eleven fourteen.

It is too late for a careful call, and she hasn’t invited an impulsive one.

I pick up the photograph of her in the towel, study the wild fall of her hair and the shine across her lips, then set it beside the compass.

Every possessive part of me wants to cross the distance anyway.

Instead, I place the phone facedown beside her letter.