Page 359
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know.”
“Do you want her back?”
The spatula stops against the pan.
Nearly two months of letters sit inside the drawer beside my bed. Charm’s handwriting fills every envelope. Her apologies, anger, humor, ownership, and cautious hope exist close enough to touch while she remains four hundred miles away.
“I don’t know how to answer that without lying,” I admit.
Briggs nods as though uncertainty is an answer he understands better than most. “Then don’t.”
“I love her.”
“You’ve never been confused about that part.”
“I don’t know whether loving her is enough to survive trying again.”
“It wasn’t last time.”
The words should piss me off. They don’t because Briggs isn’t trying to protect me from Charm by reducing her to everything she did wrong. He has read none of her letters. He doesn’t ask. When one leaves me furious, he lets me be furious. When another makes me hope, he doesn’t punish me for wanting something he knows could hurt me.
He only remembers who dragged me off the floor when loving her stopped being enough.
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t.”
I divide the eggs between two plates and slide one toward him.
Briggs looks down at it. “This is terrible.”
“You haven’t tasted it.”
“I have functioning eyes.”
“Eat.”
He takes a bite and grimaces dramatically, but he takes another.
An hour later, I stand in the doorway of the guest room while he sleeps beneath the blanket with one hand fisted near his face. The tension remains in his jaw. I leave his phone on the dresser across the room where he can see it when he wakes, then keep the door open before returning to my bedroom.
My desk is covered in paper.
The cruel version of my last letter remains crumpled inside the trash. I wrote it three nights ago after reading Charm’s promise that she could survive if I never returned. Fear translated her growth into abandonment, and I punished the page for it.
By morning, the anger had weakened enough for me to understand what she had actually given me.
She wasn’t preparing to leave.
She was releasing me from the responsibility of keeping her alive.
I answered after I believed the difference.
That is what these letters have become. Charm sends me truth, and I wait until I can determine whether the pain belongs to what she wrote or what I’m terrified it means. Sometimes the answer takes an hour. Sometimes it takes ten fucking days. She never chases me through the silence.
Tonight, I have given her a question capable of ending it.
I sit at the desk and look toward the wall separating my room from the guest room. Briggs’s suffering has taught me what love becomes when someone uses it to control the conditions of another person’s survival. Charm’s letters are teaching me that love can remain while the control is dismantled.
