His Message

The message came on an utterly ordinary afternoon. I was on the balcony helping my mom take in laundry when the phone buzzed in my pocket.

"I'm sorry."

Three syllables, from the number I had deleted and un-deleted half a year ago.

I stood among the half-collected laundry looking at those words, waiting to feel glad. Odd: nothing came. What rose instead was heat — old heat. Apparently anger can be kept like a mother stock, simmering for months, still scalding when you lift the lid.

Ten minutes later, the second message. Long, this time:

"Daisy. Sending my father to answer that door is the most cowardly thing I have ever done. When you stood outside, I was upstairs. The shadow behind the curtain was me — I think you saw it. I have my reasons, but reasons are not excuses. You crossed the world and I shut you out, and there is no explanation that washes that. I don't ask you to reply. Only — the weather is good today, and I'm sitting at the harbor, and I suddenly needed you to know: I miss you. I never stopped."

I stood on that balcony until my mother called me in to dinner.

Then I did something I have never done in my life: read it, and did not reply.

Not as a tactic. Not playing hard-to-get — I'm pushing thirty, I don't have the constitution for games. I genuinely did not know what to write. I miss you too? My pride vetoed it on sight: he left you in the rain outside a locked door without one word of explanation, and now the weather's nice and he misses you? We're done? My hands wouldn't type it. I tried seven or eight times and deleted every draft.

That night I called Vivi. Long call. She was in Florence; somewhere behind her, Matteo was playing guitar, badly.

"So he apologized," Vivi summarized, "but didn't explain."

"Correct."

"Here's my read." She sipped something. "This man is carrying something enormous — big enough that he thinks saying it out loud would crush you. So he'd rather play the villain than play the—" she stopped.

"Play the what?"

"I don't know. That's what's wrong with the picture. A-Dai, I have consumed more relationship drama than you have written code, and I can recite the standard fuckboy apology from memory. This isn't it. A fuckboy's apology asks to get back together. This one asks for something else — it asks you not to hate him. Different species entirely."

After we hung up, I read the long message one more time. And at "I'm sitting at the harbor," a detail snagged me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up again:

The timestamp. 4:11 a.m., Netherlands time.

Four in the morning. Sitting at the harbor. The weather is good today.

That night, the hospital-corridor dream didn't come. A different one did: the same room, but the curtain was open a hand's width, light coming through. He sat in a chair by the window — six months of dreams and this was the first time he was in one; he was thin in a way that dropped something through the floor of my chest — holding his phone. Typing. Deleting. Typing. Deleting.

I couldn't see the screen. But I could see his mouth, rehearsing the same shape, over and over, without sound.

I'm sorry.

I left him on read, petty as a schoolgirl.

But my dream refused to join the boycott — it went to him overnight, came back, and reported: he spent half the night typing those three syllables.