Chapter 46
THE SILENCE BETWEEN US IS LOUDER THAN TORONTO.
DARCY
The email to Martin takes four minutes to write.
I know because I watch the clock on my laptop the entire time, expecting it to feel harder than this.
I’ve spent weeks agonizing over this decision—lying awake, running scenarios, weighing the partner track against the purple toothbrush in my bathroom as if they belong on the same scale.
But when I finally sit down to do it, the words come out clean and certain, and the only thing I feel when I hit send is relief.
Martin,
I appreciate everything you’ve offered, and I want to have this conversation properly, in person. I’ll be in Toronto next week. I’d like to meet to discuss my formal resignation.
Resignation. Not leave extension. Not deferral. Resignation.
I close my laptop and sit for a moment, waiting for the panic to begin.
The tightness in my chest, the shallow breathing, the familiar spiral of what are you doing?
You’re throwing everything away. This isn’t the plan.
But it doesn’t come. The only thing in my chest is a quiet certainty that’s been building since the night Beth slept in my bed and I woke up to her burning toast in my kitchen.
I know what I want. I’ve known for a while. The only thing left is to go back and make it official.
The hard part isn’t quitting.
The hard part is telling her.
She’s at my place after work, cross-legged on the couch, with her laptop open and a pencil tucked behind her ear.
She’s reviewing the updated marina plans and working on the revised proposal with a focus that makes her brain hum at its best frequency.
Papers spread across the cushions, sticky notes on the coffee table, three different highlighters uncapped and slowly drying out because she keeps putting them down and forgetting to close them.
I sit on the edge of the coffee table across from her, and my posture must give me away because she looks up before I’ve said a word.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I take a breath. “I need to go back to Toronto.”
The shift is instant. Subtle, but I see it—her spine straightens almost imperceptibly, her fingers go still on the keyboard, her expression smooths into something carefully neutral. The mask. I haven’t seen it in weeks, and I hate that I’m the one who put it back on.
“Okay,” she says. Even. Measured. “When?”
“Monday. I need to resign in person. Pack up the condo. Tie up loose ends.” I lean forward, trying to close the distance she’s already creating. “Beth, I’m coming back. This isn’t—”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true.”
She closes the laptop. Sets it aside with a deliberateness that tells me she’s buying time to arrange her face. When she looks at me again, she’s smiling, but it’s the worst smile I’ve ever seen—technically perfect, emotionally bankrupt.
“It makes sense,” she replies. “You’ve been here all summer. You have a whole life there. An apartment, your parents, your career—”
“I’m quitting, Beth. That’s why I’m going. To quit. I’m selling the condo. I’m coming back.”
“You say that now.”
It’s not accusatory. It’s not angry. It’s worse than both of those things—it’s resigned.
The quiet, bone-deep certainty of a woman who has been left enough times to know how the story goes.
People say they’ll come back. They say it’ll be different.
And then the distance does what distance does.
The calls get shorter, and the visits get less frequent, and eventually, you stop waiting because waiting hurts more than the loss.
“I say that now because it’s what I mean,” I tell her, and I can hear the edge in my own voice. It’s not frustration with her, but frustration with every person who came before me and taught her that promises are pretty words people use before they disappear.
She pulls her knees to her chest. Makes herself smaller. “How long?”
“A couple of weeks. Maybe less.”
“A couple of weeks.” She nods slowly, and I watch her run the math.
Fourteen days, three hundred and thirty-six hours: a specific and measurable unit of time she can brace against. Beth doesn’t do well with ambiguity.
She needs edges, boundaries, concrete things she can hold on to.
I understand that about her. I love that about her.
“I’ll call you every night,” I say, and something crosses her face that I can’t read.
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t call me.” She says it quickly, like she needs to get it out before she changes her mind. “It makes it harder. Hearing your voice when you’re not here, it makes missing you worse. I can handle missing you if I’m not also hearing you miss me back.”
The words land somewhere in the center of my gut and sit there, heavy and aching.
“Beth—”
“I’m not being dramatic, Peter. I’m being practical.
” She untucks her legs and stands, gathering some of the sticky notes and highlighters with the efficient, slightly frantic energy of someone who needs to be in motion.
She doesn’t bother taking all of them, just whatever she deems important or close enough in the moment.
“Go to Toronto. Do what you need to do. And when you’re done, if you come back—”
“When I come back.”
She stops. Looks at me. And for a fraction of a second, the mask slips, and I see everything underneath—the fear, the wanting, the desperate hope she’s trying to suffocate because hope has hurt her before.
“If you come back,” she repeats, so quietly I barely hear it. “Then we can talk. Figure things out. But you need to make sure this is what you want, Peter. Really, really make sure.” She caps a highlighter and shoves it in her pocket. “I should go. I’ve got an early start in the morning.”
“You don’t have to leave.”
“I know. But I’m going to.” She crosses to me, puts her hands on my face, and kisses me.
It’s slow and firm, and tastes like goodbye, even though I’m telling her it isn’t.
When she pulls back, her eyes are bright but dry.
Elizabeth Cameron does not feel comfortable crying in front of people. Not even me. Not yet.
“Don’t call,” she says against my mouth.
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Peter.”
“I know.”
She picks up her bag, walks to the door, and pauses with her hand on the frame. Doesn’t turn around.
“For the record,” she says clearly, confidently, “I hope you make whatever choice makes you happiest. You deserve it.”
When the door closes behind her, the house goes quiet. I stand in my living room, surrounded by her sticky notes and uncapped highlighters, and I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
Toronto is exactly as I left it.
The condo smells stale. It has that particular emptiness of a space that’s been closed up and waiting.
I open the windows, and the noise of the city pours in.
It feels surprisingly foreign. A few months ago, this was the soundtrack to my life.
The sirens, the traffic, the constant low-grade hum of millions of people existing in proximity.
Now it sounds like static. Background noise with no signal.
I spend Monday with Martin. He takes the news well.
Better than I expected. Shakes my hand, tells me the door is always open, asks if it’s about a girl.
I tell him it’s about a lot of things, and he nods like he understands, and maybe he does.
Martin is a good man. He just lives in a world where the corner office is the finish line, and I’ve realized I was running a race I never belonged in.
Tuesday and Wednesday, I pack. The condo is mostly furniture I bought because a real-estate agent told me it would “stage well.” I feel nothing about leaving any of it.
It’s nothing like the cottage with its warm, cozy furniture Neve so carefully and deliberately picked out for me, knowing how I wanted the place to feel: like home.
I keep the books. My mother’s recipe box. The framed photo of me, Leo, and my parents at the lake house when we were seventeen. Everything else can go with the sale.
On Thursday, I break.
I’m in my half-empty living room, surrounded by boxes and the particular loneliness of a life being disassembled, so I pick up my phone and type.
I miss you.
I stare at it for thirty seconds. She asked me not to call. She didn’t specifically say no texts, which is a technicality any self-respecting adult would recognize as bullshit. But I send it anyway, because I’m weak and the silence between us is louder than Toronto.
She doesn’t respond.
Not that night.
Not Friday morning.
Not while I’m signing the paperwork to list the condo, or while I’m having dinner with my parents and Mom is asking about Beth every twelve minutes.
Not while I’m lying in a bed that doesn’t smell like her, staring at a ceiling that has no wooden beams or character, in a building where no one knows my name.
She doesn’t respond, and I tell myself that’s okay. She asked for space. I’m giving her space. This is healthy and mature and respectful, and I am absolutely going to lose my mind.
On Saturday morning, I’m taping a box shut when my phone buzzes. It’s Leo.
Heads up. She asked me for your address.
My heart stops. Then restarts at approximately twice its normal speed.
Me:
When?
Leo:
About 20 minutes ago. I gave it to her. Hope that’s ok.
Me:
Did she say why?
Leo:
No. She just said “I need his address, Leopold” in that voice she uses when she’s already decided something and God himself couldn’t talk her out of it.
I set the phone down. Pick it up. Set it down again.
She asked for my address.
She asked for my address.
I look around the condo—boxes everywhere, furniture tagged for donation, walls bare, where frames of meaningless artwork used to hang. I look at the half-packed kitchen, the empty bookshelves, the suitcase by the door that’s been ready to go since Wednesday.
And as I continue packing, with a giant smile on my face, I wait.