Chapter 27
Matt
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. Again. The screen lit up with another call I had no intention of answering.
I ignored it. Took another bite of Chinese takeout that had gone cold twenty minutes ago. The lo mein tasted like nothing. Everything tasted like nothing lately.
"Who keeps calling you?" Frank asked from the other end of the couch.
"Nobody important."
"Sounds pretty persistent for nobody important."
I stabbed at the noodles with chopsticks. "Don't worry about it."
Frank didn't push. Just went back to his own food. He'd been doing better. Ten days clean. The color coming back into his face, his appetite returning, his hands steady for the first time in weeks. He looked more like my brother and less like the ghost I'd been watching over for a month.
Bob sat at our feet, tracking every chopstick movement with the intense focus of a dog who'd learned that dinner was a spectator sport with occasional audience participation.
I pulled a piece of hot dog from my fried rice. Held it up. "Bob."
Tail into overdrive. Ears locked. Every cell of his body committed to the incoming catch.
I tossed it. He caught it mid-air and swallowed it whole, then looked at me with an expression that clearly communicated his belief that there was more where that came from and he was prepared to wait indefinitely.
"Spoiled," I muttered.
"He's happy," Frank said. "That's what matters."
My phone buzzed again. Carrie. Fourth time in the past hour. Before that, three texts I hadn't opened.
I silenced it. Set it face down on the table.
"Matt." Frank's voice shifted into something careful. Measured. The tone people use right before they say the thing you've been dreading.
"Don't."
"She deserves better than this."
"I said don't."
"Better than the cold treatment you've been dishing out. She's been trying to reach you for a week. Calling. Texting. And you're sitting here ignoring her like she's a telemarketer."
"Stay out of it, Frank."
"I can't." He set down his food. Turned to face me. "Not when I'm watching you destroy the best thing that's happened to you in years."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I was there, Matt. I watched her tell you she loved you and I watched you walk right past her like she was a piece of furniture. I saw her face when you did it. You didn't. But I did."
Something tightened in my chest at that. The image I'd been refusing to look at, Carrie standing in my doorway with three words still hanging in the air and my back already turned.
"She was sitting with them tonight," I said. "Looking pissed that we won. Looking like she cared more about the White Hearts than about me."
"Or maybe she was surrounded by her bosses and couldn't celebrate without losing her job. Did you consider that?"
I stood up. Grabbed my container. Headed for the kitchen. "I don't want to talk about this."
"Of course you don't. Because talking about it would mean actually dealing with what you're feeling instead of burying it under the ice."
"I'm not burying anything."
"Really? Because from where I'm sitting, you've been running since the second she tried to tell you how she felt.
You're punishing her for bad timing, Matt.
She said she loved you and you were too worried about me to hear it.
And now instead of going back and having the conversation, you're ghosting her. "
I slammed my container on the counter. Rice spilled over the edge. "I'm not punishing anyone. I'm protecting myself."
"From what?"
"From getting hurt again." The words came out louder than I'd planned. Rawer. "From trusting someone who's still figuring out whether she means what she says. From being with someone who works for my biggest rival and might choose them over me the second it matters."
The apartment went quiet. Just Bob's breathing and the hum of the refrigerator and everything I'd been holding in my chest for a week now sitting in the open air between us.
"You're scared," Frank said.
"I'm realistic."
"You're terrified she's going to leave. So you're leaving first. Building the distance before she can, so when it happens you can tell yourself you saw it coming."
I turned away. Gripped the counter edge with both hands. "You don't understand."
"I understand exactly. I've been doing it my whole life. Pushing people away before they can disappoint me. Running before anyone can leave. And look where it got me." He paused. "Ten days clean on my brother's couch with a stolen phone number and a dog who loves me more than I deserve."
My phone buzzed from the living room. Carrie. Still trying.
"She's not going to wait forever," Frank said. "Eventually she'll stop calling. And then you'll have exactly what you were afraid of. Except it'll be your fault."
I spun around. "You don't get to lecture me about relationships."
"You're right. But I can tell you about regret."
"This is different."
"Is it?" Frank stood. Crossed his arms. "Because it looks the same from here. You're acting like—" He stopped. Shook his head.
"Say it."
"It's not—"
"Say it, Frank."
He met my eyes.
"You're acting just like Dad."
The words went through me the way a blind-side hit goes through you on the ice.
The kind you don't see coming, the kind that rearranges your skeleton before your brain registers that you've been hit.
My hands dropped from the counter. My chest went hollow.
And somewhere behind my ribs, something cracked open that I'd spent twenty years welding shut.
"What did you just say?"
"You heard me." Frank's voice had gone quiet. Not angry. Sad. The worst kind of delivery for the worst kind of truth. "You can't see it, but you're doing exactly what he did. Exactly."
"I'm nothing like him."
"He ran too. Every time Mom needed him. Every time things got hard or complicated or required him to be vulnerable. He ran. Found reasons. Convinced himself he was being smart when really he was just being afraid."
The kitchen tilted. Or maybe I tilted. The memory was coming whether I wanted it or not, arriving the way memories do when someone says the one word that unlocks the vault.
Dad in the doorway. The suitcase. Not a dramatic exit, not a fight, not any of the things that would have at least given us something to be angry at.
Just a man putting on his coat in the morning like he was going to work, except the suitcase was wrong and his eyes were wrong and Mom was standing at the kitchen table with her coffee going cold and her face going through something I didn't have a name for at eight years old.
"I'll call you guys," he'd said.
He didn't.
"Mom needed the same thing from him," Frank said, and his voice cracked now, the ten-days-clean steadiness giving way to something older, something that lived in both of us.
"She needed to know he wouldn't leave when things got hard.
That he'd fight for her instead of walking away.
That he'd choose her even when choosing was scary. "
My eyes burned. My jaw ached from clenching.
"But he didn't fight," Frank continued. "Too proud.
Too stubborn. Too busy being a man who had it all together to admit he was terrified of losing what he had.
So he left. Over and over. Until Mom stopped asking him to stay.
And then one morning he was gone for good and we spent the rest of our childhood wondering what we did wrong. "
The silence that followed was the heaviest thing in the room. Heavier than the argument. Heavier than the week of ignored calls. A silence built from twenty years of a wound neither of us talked about because talking about it meant admitting it had shaped everything we'd become.
Frank, who ran toward chaos because standing still felt too much like waiting for someone to leave.
Me, who ran from everyone who got close because staying meant trusting, and trusting meant handing someone the power to walk out the door with a suitcase and never call.
"I'm not him," I said. Quietly. Not sure who I was convincing.
"Then don't act like him. Don't run from Carrie because you're scared. Don't push her away because it's easier than being honest about what you feel. Don't make the same mistakes he made and spend the rest of your life regretting it."
My phone buzzed. Again. Carrie. Still calling a man who'd been ignoring her for a week. Still trying when I'd given her every reason to stop.
"She's still reaching out," Frank said. "That means she cares enough to keep showing up even when you're being an ass. But she won't do it forever. Nobody does. And when she stops, you'll know exactly who was responsible."
The counter was cold under my hands. My knuckles were white. My whole body was clenched around something I'd been refusing to let in, and Frank's words had cracked the seal, and now it was flooding through whether I was ready or not.
He was right. I could feel the truth of it settling into my bones, cold and clean. I was being my father. Making the same moves. Running the same plays. Choosing the safety of silence over the risk of actually saying what I felt and letting someone close enough to matter.
And if I kept running, I'd end up exactly where Dad ended up. Alone. Disappeared. A man who showed up in his children's stories only as the example of what not to become.
"Talk to her," Frank said. "Please. Before it's too late. Before you lose her because you were too scared to stay."
I didn't answer. My voice was locked behind something I wasn't going to break in front of my brother. But I looked at Bob, asleep now on the couch, perfectly content, perfectly trusting, and I thought about the woman who'd rescued him from a chain in the rain before she'd known my name.
She'd stayed for the dog. Stood in the rain for an animal that wasn't hers.
She'd driven across town at midnight when Frank called because "you matter to me, which means he matters to me.
" She'd sat in my apartment watching my brother cry through withdrawal because nobody had asked her to leave and she hadn't offered.
She'd told me she loved me standing in my doorway with nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Every time I'd run, she'd stayed. Every time I'd shut a door, she'd knocked. Every time I'd given her a reason to walk away, she'd chosen not to.
And I'd been too busy being my father to see it.
Maybe she'd stay for me too. If I stopped running long enough to give her a reason.