Chapter 23 Charlie #2
“You didn’t have to save me to love me,” Wyatt said. “You just had to call.”
The sentence landed in the center of my chest and stayed there, heavy and warm, and I understood that it was not just about Wyatt.
It was about Asher. It was about every person I’d tried to love through competence instead of presence.
Through action instead of vulnerability.
Through the impressive structural achievement of doing something rather than the terrifying structural exposure of being something—being available, being reachable, being the kind of person who picks up the phone and says “I need you” without building a three-year research project to justify it.
“I’m sorry I stopped calling,” I said.
“I’m sorry I let you,” he said. “I could have pushed harder. I could have shown up. I told myself you needed space and that was partially true and partially me being scared of the same thing you were.”
“What thing?”
“That we’re all we’ve got. And that means we can lose each other. And that’s terrifying. So, we both just—stopped. Like not calling was safer than calling because at least the silence was something we could control.”
We were quiet together. The good quiet. The kind I’d shared with Asher on the deck and with Mia on the couch and with Sarah on dive boats in the blue hours before dawn. The quiet of people who have said the hard thing and are resting on the other side of it.
“Wy?”
“Yeah.”
“I missed you. That’s the other thing I should have said six years ago. I missed you every day and I turned it into a water system because that was less frightening than saying it out loud.”
He laughed. Wet. The kind of laugh that happens when someone is crying and doesn’t want to admit it. “You are so messed up, Charlie. We are so messed up.”
“We really are.”
“Call me tomorrow. And the day after that. OK? Just—call me. It doesn’t have to be about anything. It can be about your terrible taste in coffee or whatever. Just call.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
We hung up. I sat at Mia’s kitchen table with the phone in my good hand and the brace on my other wrist and the tears drying on my face. The apartment was quiet and the city was loud outside and something had shifted. Not resolved. Not fixed. Shifted.
Mia appeared in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas. She’d been in her room—giving me privacy, I realized, though the apartment was small enough that she’d probably heard everything anyway.
“You called him,” she said.
“I called him.”
She sat down across from me. Pulled her knees up in the chair the way she’d been sitting since college. “How was it?”
“Terrible. Good. Both.” I turned the phone over in my hand. “He already knew. About the not-calling, about why. He knew.”
“Of course he knew. You’re not subtle, Charlie. You never have been. You think you’re this locked-down fortress of rationality, but everyone around you can see exactly what you’re doing because you do it loudly, and with blueprints.”
I almost laughed. “That’s essentially what Wyatt said.”
“He’s your brother. He would know.” Mia tilted her head. Studied me with the careful attention she’d been deploying since the eighth grade. “You’re thinking about Asher.”
“I’m thinking about the fact that I accused him of managing instead of loving and I’ve spent three years doing exactly the same thing.
” I set the phone down. “He builds walls. I build water systems. He hires security teams. I file grant applications. He controls everything around him because he’s terrified of losing people.
I cut everyone off because I’m terrified of needing them, and it’s the same thing, Mia. We’re the same.”
“OK,” Mia said. “And?”
“And what?”
“And what do you do with that? You see it now. You see the pattern. Same question he’s probably asking himself right now in that house—what do you do once you know?”
I didn’t have an answer. The honest response was that I didn’t know, and for once I let that be the answer instead of manufacturing something more impressive.
“I’m good at leaving. I’m good at wrapping up the loss and filing it and moving on to the next project.
I did it with my parents. I did it with Wyatt.
I almost did it with Sarah—I could feel myself starting to, bracing for the loss before it came—and then Sarah died before I could finish building the wall. ”
Mia didn’t argue. Mia almost never argued when I was right.
“So, what do I do?” I asked. Not rhetorically. I was genuinely asking my best friend what to do because I was thirty-two years old and sitting in her kitchen at midnight with a sprained wrist and a broken heart and I didn’t have a blueprint for this.
“I think,” Mia said carefully, “you just sit here. You drink your tea. You call your brother tomorrow like you promised. And you wait to see if you’re running away from something or running toward something, because right now I don’t think you know.
And neither does Asher. And that’s OK. Not everything needs to be figured out tonight. ”
I looked at the tea. It was cold. The apartment was warm. Reid was parked outside in the SUV because a man I’d left had asked—asked, not told—to keep me safe, and I’d said yes because the asking had mattered even when everything else was broken.
I wasn’t ready to go back. I wasn’t sure I would go back. But I wasn’t running anymore. The difference was small and it was everything. I sat with it at Mia’s kitchen table and let it be enough for now.