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“You never asked me.”

“No.” His voice was quiet. “I never asked you.”

The words hung between us. I could still remember the conversations we'd had about our future, the casual assumptions that had seemed so natural at the time. We'd talked about sharing a place, deciding where to put the furniture, and working out who would be responsible for what. We'd been young, but we'd never treated our relationship as something temporary.

At least, I hadn't.

“You decided I wouldn't go,” I said.

“I decided you shouldn't have to.”

“That isn't the same thing.”

“No, it isn't.” His shoulders drew inward. “I know that now. I knew it not long after I left, if I'm honest with myself. But by then I'd already done the damage, and I was too much of a coward to face it.”

I looked at him, trying to reconcile the man sitting in front of me with the boy I'd loved. They were the same person, of course. The years had changed him, and me, but the familiar gestures were still there: the way he pressed his lips together when he was struggling to say something, the way his gaze dropped when he knew he'd done wrong.

Recognizing those things didn't make me feel any better. If anything, it made the hurt more immediate.

“What did you tell your parents?”

“That I was leaving and that they weren't to tell you until I was gone.” He swallowed. “They tried to talk me out of it. Both of them. They told me I was making a mistake, that I should talk to you, and that you deserved to know what was happening. I wouldn't listen. I made them promise they wouldn't interfere.”

“My mother found out from your mother after you'd already left.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” My fingers tightened around the chair arms. “Because I spent days wondering what I'd done wrong. I kept thinking you'd call and explain, or that there had been some terrible misunderstanding. I thought maybe you'd met someone else. I went over every conversation we'd had, trying to find the moment when I'd somehow ruined everything without realizing it.”

His face tightened, and he looked away.

“I never met anyone else before I left.”

“I didn't know that.”

“I should have told you.” He paused, his throat working. “I should have told you a lot of things.”

I wanted him to understand that the worst part hadn't been simply learning he'd gone. It had been the silence afterward, the empty space where an explanation should have been, and the way I'd been left to invent reasons for something I couldn't make sense of. But the words caught in my throat. I wasn't sure I could explain it without reliving every miserable day.

Josiah leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.

“I kept telling myself I'd contact you once I got settled. At basic training, I thought I'd wait until I had something useful to tell you. Then I was moving on to the next stage of training, and I told myself I'd call when I knew where I was going to be stationed. I kept finding reasons to wait.”

“You could have picked up a phone.”

“I could have.” He met my eyes. “There was nothing stopping me. I could have called you and admitted I'd made a terrible mistake. I could have written you a letter. I could have come home and faced you. I did none of those things because I was afraid of what you'd say, and because every day I stayed away made it harder to explain why I'd stayed away in the first place.”

His hands separated, then came together again.

“I was at Lackland when I realized how badly I'd handled it. I thought about calling you more times than I can count. Then I went to RAF Mildenhall in England for two years, and I thought I'd call once I was settled there. After that, I moved to Travis, then Mountain Home. There was always another move, another reason to put it off. Eventually, I had to admit that the moves weren't the reason I hadn't contacted you. They were just convenient excuses.”

I watched him struggle with the words. There was no easy way to hear that he'd thought about calling me so often, yet never actually done it. Part of me wanted to ask why he'd let me wait for him when he had no intention of coming back. Another part was afraid of the answer.

“Then you left the Air Force,” I said. “You went into police work in Baltimore. And still nothing.”

He nodded. “By then, I had no excuse at all. I was making my own choices. I could have called, and I could have told you the truth. Instead, I convinced myself that you'd moved on and that hearing from me would only reopen something you'd managed to put behind you.”

“You didn't know whether I'd moved on.”