Chapter 12
I sent it at 9:47. That was the time on the microwave clock when I hit send, and it was the same time twenty minutes later when I checked again.
The message was still delivered. Not read. I set the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and left it there.
My apartment looked the same as it had that morning, but it didn't feel the same. I'd moved the chair back against the wall after she'd left. I'd put her mug in the cabinet. I told myself that was restraint, that choice I'd written about — making home a decision, not a place. Now I was just standing in a kitchen at night listening to the refrigerator hum.
I hadn't turned on the overhead light. The lamps were off too. Light came in from the window, that same warm spill that had been on our faces out on the terrace. Monaco at night never really went dark. The marina lights threw a low amber glow across my ceiling, and the bokeh from the street below blurred and sharpened every time a car passed. It was the exact lighting from our last night on that terrace, only now there was no one across from me to catch it.
At 10:15 I picked up the phone. I turned it over, thumb hovering over the keyboard.
I didn't type anything. I put it back down.
That was the behavior I'd been practicing since she walked away with that patterned suitcase. On the terrace I hadn't been able to keep my hands still — I'd cupped her face, I'd pulled her forehead to mine, I'd let the tears run because I couldn't stop them. Now the whole test was in not reaching out. I could hear my own breathing in the quiet apartment, slow and deliberate the way it had been when I'd tried to hold eye contact with her and not look away.
I made coffee I didn't want. I poured water into the machine and watched it drip. I stood at the window with the mug in my hands and watched the lights across the water. Somewhere down there was the bar where we'd stood. The stools would be empty now, the railing cold. I tried not to picture her on a train or in some other city's apartment, looking at different lights and feeling the same pull backward.
By eleven the coffee was cold. The phone hadn't moved. Delivered. Not read.
I thought about what I'd written to her — that home wasn't the apartment or Monaco or any pin on a map, that it was the choice to keep the door open for her, to keep the space here hers whether she was in it or not. It had sounded clear when I typed it. Now, with no answer, it sounded like I'd just told her I could live without her, and that was the opposite of what I'd meant.
My thumb found the edge of the phone again. I unlocked it. The cursor blinked in the empty field under my last message. I typed "You don't have to answer tonight" and then I deleted it, letter by letter. I typed "Are you okay?" and deleted that too.
I locked the phone and slid it to the far end of the counter, out of reach.
At eleven-thirty I sat on the floor. My back against the cabinet, knees pulled up. It was quieter down there. The city lights kept flickering across the ceiling, warm and then a little dimmer, warm again. I counted my breaths the way I'd counted hers when she used to fall asleep next to me. In, out. In, out. The apartment didn't feel empty because of the furniture. It felt empty because there was no second set of lungs in the room.
Midnight came. The microwave clock flipped to 12:00. I told myself if she hadn't read it by one, I'd let myself close my eyes.
At 12:18 the phone lit up.
It wasn't a text. The screen flared bright against the dark counter, and the whole kitchen filled with that white glow. Amber's name was on it, and below it the little phone icon and the word calling.
May you like
I stared at it for a half second while it rang. My chest tightened the way it had when I'd said that first line to her on the terrace — that I didn't think saying goodbye for a few days would hurt this much. My hand was shaking before I reached for it.
I didn't answer yet. The light kept pulsing, and her name held there on my screen, waiting for me to pick up.
