28
Lia
It’s been four days since our fight, and I haven’t spoken to Owen once. I don’t know what it means—a temporary silent treatment, or the end of it all.
I know I have to apologize. I do. It’s my turn. He’s been so good about apologizing first, humbling himself after every fight, even when we’d both been equally to blame. And this time it’s not equal. This time it’s me.
He was just trying to help, and I couldn’t handle it—all of the worst, most caustic parts of myself storming out at full force, fueled by exhaustion and hunger and screaming, jolting fear.
It’s an explanation, but it’s no excuse.
I wouldn’t blame him if he could never forgive me. The ruthless, callous way I stabbed into his most secret wounds, letting those strangers believe he would hurt me, then forcing him to go...
I wouldn’t forgive me either.
Yet every time I pick up my phone to type a text, I freeze.
Rationalization is a coward’s voice in my head, telling me the fact that he hasn’t reached out means he must really be done with me. And after he’s made such Herculean efforts to respect my boundaries, even the unreasonable ones… what if this is his boundary? Should I respect it in turn?
My next instinct is to ask Sophie what to do, but I can’t do that either.
She doesn’t even know the truth about my situation with Connor, let alone the truth of my feelings for Owen.
How they’d grown against my will, ungovernable as wildfire, warming me and consuming me and scorching the bitterness straight out of my heart, leaving nothing but raw, charred earth and the horrifying vulnerability of falling in love.
And what good would it do to tell her that now?
So instead, I settle for talking to Sophie about other things. Anything else. Allowing myself a few more days. Bracing myself for the possibility that Owen won’t accept my apology. That this is the end.
I don’t want to be at home. Connor’s letter has me peeking around corners, clutching keys between knuckles, existing with the lights off to give nothing away. I’ve never been scared of my own home before.
All this goes to say, when Sophie and Andy invite me over for dinner, it’s an immediate yes. I figure hey, maybe I can get drunk enough that they’ll have to let me crash. I can avoid the darkest parts of the night and return home for Archie’s morning walk without explaining a thing.
Nolan is already at their apartment when I arrive.
Andy is making a coconut curry. I embroider at their kitchen table, sublimating into the rhythm of the stitches as the smell of caramelized onions wafts around us.
Sophie chatters about the new surveys her research group is using and it’s interesting.
Really. Normally, I’m genuinely intrigued by this stuff—the way her brain works, how kindly and thoughtfully she approaches science education—but tonight I can barely focus.
When the food is ready, Sophie lights candles and Andy serves, and for the first hour Owen doesn’t come up at all, yet somehow my mind keeps snagging on loose threads of conversation, tying them back to him.
I wonder what he’d think of the cheap wine we’re drinking, what biting quip he would make about our frat-house-basement taste.
When Nolan checks the score on the Sox game, I think of their burgeoning friendship. How much it meant to Owen. How much more lonely he is than he would ever admit.
Even Andy’s mannerisms, the ones I used to consider so uniquely him—his straight posture, the tick in his jaw, the fingers he runs through his hair when he’s uncomfortable with a turn in the conversation—I realize how many of them are more nature than nurture, shared with someone older, more sarcastic, more playful.
When only the final few bites of curry are left in each of our bowls, milky amber swirls of chicken and coconut, Andy finally speaks up.
“So is there a reason you don’t want to talk about Paris?” he asks. “Did you end it with my brother already or something?”
End it.
It’s ridiculous to feel sad about those words.
End what? It wasn’t supposed to be serious between us.
We were both very clear about that from the start.
Even after Paris. Even after he called me his girlfriend and I briefly, hypothetically, glimpsed a chance at something lasting—at love—I knew that neither of us wanted to make the unforced error of twisting our life around someone else’s.
All the same, the thought of not seeing him anymore, of facing my life and my job and my fears without him, is needle-sharp in my chest.
When everything happened with Connor, I swore off serious relationships. Too much risk and not enough reward. But I can admit that things had felt different with Owen. I trusted him with parts of myself that no one else knew, and he did the same. That had to mean something, right?
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all we could ever be to each other. A vault locked tight, key tossed to the ocean, never to be opened again. A finite row of stitches with a neat knot at the end.
I scoop another spoonful of rice into my bowl, stirring it left then right before answering Andy’s question.
“Maybe. We’re fighting again.”
“What about?” Sophie asks, all doe-eyes and open concern. She’s already in pajamas—red cotton tee, gray cotton shorts, hair piled high atop her head. Andy, meanwhile, is in business casual despite having an entirely remote job. I guess the overdressed thing is Walsh nature, too.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Nothing. Everything. Connor stuff.”
“Connor stuff?” Sophie’s voice skyrockets.
“Did he contact you again?” Nolan asks.
“I don’t like this, Lia,” Andy says. “He’s always been a creep.”
“Has he done anything besides text you?” Sophie asks, not knowing the half of it.
“No, no,” I say, lying to my best friend’s face. “It’s not a big deal.”
But then I pause, Owen’s words echoing through my mind.
Let us in. Let us love you.
There’s so much they don’t know.
I never wanted to bother them with it at all. Never wanted to peel back my hard exoskeleton and expose the soft, damaged core of myself. Never wanted to be seen as weak.
All my nevers weigh down on me as I look across the table. To Andy, the stern furrow between his brows. To Sophie, hazel eyes wide with affection and concern. To my brother, the first best friend I ever had, the one I think always suspected more than he let on.
This is NASA. We’ve loved each other at our best and worst since we were teenagers. I genuinely don’t think there’s anything I could do or say that would make them love me less.
So what am I so scared of?
Just myself. The tight fist of my control clenched around my self-image—insisting I’m not the kind of woman who would ever let that happen.
It’s fucked up. I know it is. I would never think like that about someone else’s story. But I’ve never figured out how to be kind to myself about what happened. Not in all these years of trying.
Trying alone.
Let us in. Let us love you.
“Actually,” I amend, “can I tell you guys something?”
Then, I do.
I tell them everything. Every raw, unhealed wound I’ve bandaged over with rage for eight years, since I first met Connor.
The way he was behind closed doors and the reasons I hid it.
Then this year, the messages, the stalking, the letter, the fight.
The fact that he’s back in Boston, that he works at Owen’s firm.
My shame and fear around reporting it to authorities, the seeming impossibility of ever escaping him.
Sophie is crying when I finish. I know she doesn’t want to be, would stop it if she could, but she can’t.
Andy is squeezing her hand under the table.
Nolan’s head is in his hands, elbows pressed into the wood, processing with his eyes closed.
They apologize for not realizing it sooner and I fucking hate that part.
I want to rush past the sorry’s because that’s not the point.
The past is the past but this is now. It’s getting in the way of my career, my relationships… my whole life.
I can’t live like this anymore, and I can’t solve it on my own either.
“And you know what’s really stupid?” I ask, rounding out my story with brutal honesty, proverbial armor scattered across the room.
“I feel like the worst feminist in the world, because all I want is for someone else to handle it for me. I never want to speak to Connor again, even if I knew how it would go. Even if I knew I would win, I never, ever want to face him.” I force myself to look up from my hands, finding my brother’s face. “I think I need help.”
“We want to help,” Nolan says, light brown eyes that mirror mine pouring his heart onto the table.
“Anything, Lia,” Sophie says. “We’ll do anything. Whatever you want.”
Andy shakes his head down at the table. “This is what he meant.”
“What?” I ask.
He looks up at me. “I invited Owen to come tonight. I didn’t realize you guys were fighting. He said he didn’t want you to feel like he was closing in on you, and I told him that made no fucking sense but he was adamant he needed to give you space. He refused to come.”
The words have pressure building behind my eyes. That incredible, selfless man.
I thought he was disengaging—thought I finally pushed him overboard—when really his silence these last few days was evidence of just how well he knows me, how determined he is to make sure I’m comfortable and safe.
Parallel lines scrape down my heart, the shape of all the false parallels Owen draws; between himself and his father, himself and Connor, himself and all the ugliest shades of humanity that I never once saw in his springwater blue eyes.
I thought he was done with me, when really he’d cast himself as the villain. Again.
My heart is a puddle, pooling at the bottom of my gut.
Andy continues, “He didn’t think you’d want him here.”
“I want him here,” I say, immediate and firm.
Andy looks at his wife, a question in his eyes. She nods back at him. It’s a language I don’t quite speak, one I’m still fumbling to decipher when Andy says, “He’s upstairs.”
I jolt in my seat. “What?”
“He’s on the roof deck. Waiting for you. He wanted to be nearby in case you wanted to see him, and I told him I wasn’t going to play whatever weird game this is between you guys but—”
I don’t wait for Andy to finish his sentence.
I’m out the door, bolting for the stairwell, Doc Martens pounding faster than my heart. Two flights then a grey metal door that I haul open with all my strength. The darkened sky and the late-summer wind.
And he’s there.