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Yours Truly,
Sloane
I stepped away from the laptop. With the email written, all I had left to do was pack. I downloaded the Moving Buddy app and used it to hire a same-day crew. They told me they’d be at my apartment within the hour. Once I had confirmation from them, I called to rent a storage unit. I had been paying month to month on my rental, so I’d just turn the key into the apartment manager and that would be it. I could just disappear.
I would wait to send the email until everything was cleared from my apartment and I was heading out. That way, by the time Wesley received and read it, I’d be long gone, and he’d have no way of finding me.
Which was exactly how I wanted things to go.
CHAPTER22
***WESLEY***
The second I got home from Sloane’s apartment, I plugged my phone into the charger and sat down, staring at it. Much like a watched pot’s propensity for boiling, a cell phone seldom chimes when you need it to. I grabbed a deck of cards off the shelf and shuffled them the requisite seven times to ensure mathematical randomness and then an eighth time just to be sure. This was a deck I kept around and available for when my mother visited. As such, it was soft and worn, the cards flowing comfortably into each other with every riffle. My mom loved all card games and was always so eager to play. She knew so many, too. It was remarkable how many things you could do with just a standard deck of cards. But she wasn’t here right now. And neither was Sloane.
Which limited my number of options for ways to pass the time.
I knew of only one game I could play by myself with a standard deck and so dealt out a game of classic solitaire. In doing so, I made my way through the draw deck a few times, ritualistically playing the cards where they belonged, alternating the colors and building up the piles starting with the aces. It was just about the most active thing I could do at the moment without requiring an ounce of thought. At one point, I found myself stuck and considered making a slight adjustment to move things along, but that struck me as dishonest, even if I was just playing by myself and nobody would know.
Even when I wasn’t competing with anyone, I still ended up losing.
It was no matter: I could play again. I piled the cards up and shuffled them together, dealing them out again. All the while, I continued to glance at the phone every few seconds. This was entirely unnecessary. If it rang, I would hear it.
What a waste of time, I thought. I was playing a game by myself and not even keeping track of the score. This was just me doing the bare minimum while allowing time to move forward on its own.
If Sloane had just opened the door and let me in, we’d be making up right now and talking things out and, most importantly, we’d have each other. Instead, we were both stuck by ourselves.
For the first time in my life, I realized how pointless loneliness was. A poet once said that no man is an island, but of course some of us were. It was just we shouldn’t be. We were the proverbial tree falling in the woods. If nobody could hear our sounds and we impacted nobody, what was the point of existence?
Sloane was clearly upset and so was I, but I wondered if I couldn’t have done more. Did I give up too easily? Should I have waited longer? Would she have eventually opened up if I was just persistent enough?
I’d never know now. But I reminded myself that she’d come to her senses sooner or later and I’d see her back at work tomorrow. Or the following day at the latest.
That’s how I settled my mind. Unfortunately, it was around that time — when I’d finally convinced myself that things would be all right — that I received the email.
It was a quarter to midnight when my phone lit up and buzzed. I immediately stopped my game, letting the eight of clubs I held fall into a pile it didn’t belong. I picked up my phone and used my face to unlock the screen. Then I read the email.
Once I reached the end, I quickly scrolled back up to the top and read it again, more carefully this time, looking for any sign of hope.
There wasn’t any.
I pulled out my laptop to respond to the email, but no words came to mind. There was nothing to say other than the obvious.
Dear Sloane,
I want to be with you. You’re wrong. There is nothing more I’d want than to raise our baby and start a family with you.
Love,
Wesley
It was clear and to the point. And its brevity ensured that she’d read every word if she opened it at all. But I knew Sloane well enough to know that once she got an idea in her head, it didn’t leave easily. She’d very much made a decision and a simple email wasn’t going to change anything.
Especially since I lied.
She was right. She wrote “if you wanted so badly to be a father, why is it that you’ve never mentioned it to me before?”
The answer was that I hadn’t wanted to be a father. I’d never considered it before, but it wasn’t a dream I’d ever had. I couldn’t even imagine what a child of mine would look or act like or how I’d behave as a father. Especially after growing up with my sorry excuse for a dad.
