Chapter 28 - Jamie
JAMIE
"Declan."
"Yeah?"
"I love you."
The words are the last new vocabulary. The final entry in the language I've been learning since I walked into the Reapers facility with a duffel bag and a heart rate that would concern a cardiologist. The language that started with a cursor blinking in a search bar and that expanded through biscotti and bread and walls and doors and hallways and press conferences and coffee and a man who takes his glasses off when he wants to be real.
I love you. Three words. The simplest sentence in the English language. The hardest sentence in mine.
"I love you too," Declan says. He says it the way he says everything that matters: clearly, precisely, without qualification. The journalist's commitment to accuracy applied to the most important statement a person can make.
I close my eyes. His heartbeat is under my ear. The lamp is on. The apartment is warm.
The unnamed thing has a name. The name has a person. The person is here, in this bed, in this light, with his hand on my back and his heart under my ear.
The name is Declan. The name is love. The name is home.
The cursor is gone. The search is over. The language is learned.
And the sentence I couldn't type, the sentence that blinked and blinked and waited and waited, the sentence is spoken now, out loud, to a person, in a room that smells like books and jollof rice, and the sentence is three words, and the three words are enough.