Chapter 4: The Messages Between Them
The card stayed on the coffee table between us, its blank envelope turned faceup. Lily sat on one end of the couch. I sat on the other, careful of my incision, careful not to mistake a little quiet for forgiveness.
Then she picked up her phone.
“I saved some of the messages,” she said. “Not all of them.”
She unlocked it and scrolled. I watched her thumb slow over years of conversations, dates stacked one beneath another like doors I hadn’t known were closed.
The first message she showed me said, I need space. Please stop calling.
I read it twice. The words were mine—or, at least, they’d come from my number.
“Did I say that to you?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“I don’t remember.”
Lily’s face tightened, but she didn’t look away.
“There are more.”
The next message was shorter: Don’t come over. It’ll only make things worse.
A third said, I can’t keep managing everyone’s feelings right now.
My mouth went dry. Daniel used to say things like that when I tried to call Lily. Not those exact sentences, maybe, but close enough that I could hear his voice in the spaces between the words.
“Don’t make this a crisis,” he’d tell me. “She needs peace.”
I looked at the screen again.
“Those phrases sound like him,” I said.
Lily lowered the phone a little. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure he said things like that. I’m not sure who typed these.”
That distinction mattered. I felt it settle between us—not a defense, not an accusation. A line we might be able to stand on without either of us falling through.
She swiped to another part of the thread. There were gaps where a conversation seemed to stop, then resume weeks or months later. Some of Lily’s messages asked whether I was all right. Some said she missed me. My replies were brief, final, and strangely polished.
“I thought you were choosing not to answer,” she said. “Then I thought you were answering because you had to.”
“Did you ever call?”
“Sometimes. You’d say you were tired. Or that it wasn’t a good time.” She pressed her lips together. “Once, Daniel answered and said you were sleeping.”
I looked down at my hands. I could picture Daniel taking the phone from me, maybe because I’d been groggy after treatment. I could picture him telling me Lily had called. I could picture nothing at all.
The absence was its own kind of evidence, but it wasn’t proof.
Lily set the phone beside the card. “I kept photographs, too. I don’t know why.”
She opened a folder. In one picture, she stood beside me outside a restaurant, her hair windblown, my hand resting on her shoulder. I couldn’t remember the day. The date stamp said four years earlier.
“Do you remember this?” she asked.
“Not the photograph.”
Her expression flickered, the old hurt ready to return. I leaned forward, then stopped when my side pulled sharply beneath the dressing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that doesn’t give you the memory.”
She studied my face, looking for the familiar escape hatch: an excuse, a change of subject, a promise I couldn’t make. I had used all of those before, even when I couldn’t remember choosing them.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
The honesty stung. It also left room for something else.
Rachel knocked softly at the door. Lily glanced toward it, then at me.
“Come in,” I called.
Rachel entered with her tablet tucked under one arm. She’d stayed nearby after bringing me here, though she hadn’t pushed her way into the apartment. Now she looked from Lily’s phone to the card on the table.
“We’re trying to understand the years before tonight,” I said. “Not decide what happened before we know.”
Rachel nodded. “That’s a good way to approach it.”
She sat in the chair across from us and opened her notes. Her voice stayed calm, but I noticed how carefully she turned the tablet so Lily and I could see the screen.
“These are the notes from my visits,” she said. “I recorded what I observed and what Nora told me. I didn’t record a cause unless I had one.”
The first entry she showed us described a bruise on my arm. Another noted discoloration near my wrist. Each had a date, a brief description, and my explanation at the time.
“I said I bumped into something,” I murmured.
“That’s what you reported,” Rachel said. “I documented the words you gave me.”
Lily looked at the dates. “Did you think she was lying?”
“I didn’t know what caused the bruises,” Rachel said. “I still don’t. A note can preserve what I saw and what Nora said. It can’t tell us what happened when I wasn’t there.”
No accusation. No rescue. Just the limit of what she knew.
The restraint made my stomach knot harder than certainty might have. I had wanted someone to tell me the answer. Instead, the dates sat there, plain and patient.
One bruise had been on my arm. I remembered Daniel’s fingers around it, but the memory had no clear beginning or end. I didn’t know whether it matched that date. I didn’t know what had happened just before or just after.
“Daniel told me to say I’d caught my arm on a cabinet,” I said. “I remember him saying that. I don’t know if that was the same bruise.”
Lily’s fingers curled around her phone.
“Do you think every accident was him?” she asked.
The question came out sharper than she meant it to. I could hear fear beneath it—the fear that if she believed one thing, she’d have to believe all of it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still separating what I remember from what I was afraid to question.”
She looked down at the old messages. “I don’t want to turn everything into a lie just because some of it might have been.”
“Neither do I.”
For a moment the room held only the refrigerator’s low hum and the faint tick of the kitchen clock. I wanted to reach for her hand. I didn’t. The card had taught me that love could be real and still fail to arrive where it was meant to go. I wouldn’t demand that she bridge the distance because I was frightened.
Lily opened one of the older conversations again. She read my supposed reply, then looked at the date.
“I got this the same week I sent you a message asking if I could visit,” she said. “You told me you were done talking.”
“I don’t remember sending it.”
“I believe that you don’t remember.”
It wasn’t the same as saying she believed me. I could live with that difference for tonight.
She tapped the message details. A small panel appeared beneath the conversation. Her brow furrowed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ve never noticed this before.”
She tilted the phone toward me. Under the message, a notification showed that it had been opened on Daniel’s tablet.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.
Lily drew the phone closer, as if the words might change if she held them firmly enough.
“That doesn’t tell us who sent it,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “It doesn’t.”
May you like
But her thumb hovered over the screen, no longer scrolling past the message.
Together, we leaned closer to see what else it might tell us.
