11. Sabrina #2
I sat on the couch in the dark, watching the lights from the harbor flicker through the window.
My phone buzzed. Not a call. A text, from the new number I hadn’t blocked yet.
I’m outside. I’m not going to knock, I promised you space and I meant it. I just recorded something in the car because I couldn’t make myself drive away without saying it. It’s coming to your voicemail. You don’t have to listen. But I’m right here if you do.
A second later the voicemail notification lit up beneath it.
I should delete both without looking. That was the smart thing, the self-protective thing.
But my thumb was already moving.
I pressed play.
His voice filled the quiet room, low and rough and tired.
“Hey. I know you probably won’t listen to this. That’s okay. I’m going to say it anyway, because I need to, and because you deserve to hear it, even if you’re not ready.”
I heard him take a breath, and the next words came out softer.
“I fell in love with you at a conference in Boston. You probably don’t remember it, but I remember every detail.
You were presenting your research on signal processing, and your slides had this terrible color scheme that looked like someone had vomited a rainbow onto a PowerPoint.
But your data was brilliant. Your methodology was airtight.
And when someone in the audience tried to poke holes in your conclusions, you dismantled his argument so thoroughly that I actually felt sorry for him. ”
I remembered that conference. I remembered the man in the third row who’d questioned my statistical significance, and I remembered the visceral satisfaction of proving him wrong.
“Afterward, I found you at the reception. You were eating shrimp and looking bored, and I walked up to you and said something incredibly stupid about your presentation being interesting. You looked at me with this expression, this completely unimpressed expression, and you said, ‘Interesting is what people say when they don’t understand what they’re looking at.
’ And I knew right then that I was going to marry you. ”
His voice cracked slightly.
“I didn’t tell you that, obviously. I told you my name, and you told me yours, and then you proceeded to spend the next hour explaining exactly why my research proposal was pretentious and how I could make it better.
You were the first person in years who actually challenged me.
Who treated me like someone who could be wrong.
Who didn’t care about my money or my company or my name.
You just saw me. The real me, with all the awkward parts and the weird obsessions and the brain that never stops racing. ”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
“I’ve loved you every day since then. Even when I wasn’t showing it.
Even when I was disappearing into work and missing dinners and letting you down.
I know that doesn’t make it okay. I know love without action is just a word.
But I need you to know that the love was always there.
It’s still there. It will always be there, no matter what happens. ”
Silence. Then:
“I carry guilt about what I’ve done to you.
To us. I watch you sometimes, when you don’t know I’m looking, and I see how tired you are.
How small you’ve become. And I know I did that.
I dimmed your light by never being present, by making you doubt that you mattered.
That’s what I was trying to tell Sully that night.
Not that I regret marrying you. That I regret what I’ve done since.
That I’m terrified I’ve broken us beyond repair. ”
Another pause. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not asking for another chance. I’m just asking you to know the truth. I love you, Sabrina. I’ve loved you since the day we met. And I’m so sorry that I made you forget it.”
The voicemail ended.
I sat in the dark for a long time, the phone pressed against my chest, my heart beating hard enough to hurt.
He hadn’t defended himself. Hadn’t tried to explain away what he’d said or minimize the damage he’d caused. He’d just told me the truth, raw and unvarnished, and left it there for me to do with what I would.
It didn’t fix anything. The pain was still there, the doubt, the fear that nothing would ever really change.
But underneath all of it, buried deep where I’d been trying to ignore it, was the stubborn, inconvenient truth that I still loved him too.
I got up and went to the window before I could talk myself out of it.
He was still there. He hadn’t been lying.
His car sat at the end of the dark drive, the engine off, and I could see the shape of him behind the wheel, not watching the cabin, not waiting for me to appear, just sitting with his forehead dropped against the steering wheel, the recording clearly having cost him to make.
He didn’t know I was looking. That was the part that undid me.
There was no performance in it, no audience, only a man alone in a dark car outside a house he wasn’t allowed into, unable to make himself leave.
I stood at the glass with the phone still warm in my hand and didn’t go out to him.
But I didn’t close the curtain, either. I watched until his headlights finally came on and he backed slowly down the drive, and I told myself the ache in my chest was only exhaustion.