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Two letters. No capital. No punctuation. Nothing after it.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
Her heart didn’t skip. It sank. It went down through her chest like a stone dropped into the lake, cold and fast and all the way to the bottom, and for a second she couldn’t feel her hands, and it had nothing to do with the cold.
Ryan.
After nine months of nothing. After I just don’t think I’m in love with you, said across a restaurant table like he was reading her the weather. After she had packed her whole life into a car and driven it across the state to get as far away from that table as she possibly could.
hi
Like he’d stepped out for coffee. Like nothing had happened. Like she was a door he could knock on whenever he got bored, and she would always, always open it.
She stared at the two letters.
Someone said morning, Ms. Hayes as they passed her on the sidewalk and she said morning back without seeing who it was.
She made herself start walking again, because standing frozen on Main Street staring at her phone was going to make someone ask if she was okay, and she did not know how to answer that.
The garlands were still on the lampposts. The snow was still bright. But the morning had changed color somehow, the way a room changes when a cloud slides over the sun, and her head was full of a low roaring sound, and she walked the rest of the way to The Brook without seeing a single thing.
* * *
The bell rang when she opened the door. It sounded very far away.
She sat at her table by the window. She did not remember deciding to sit down. Molly set a mug in front of her and Allison said thank you, and Molly looked at her for one second longer than usual, the way Molly noticed everything, and then went away and came back and set a cinnamon roll wrapped in parchment beside the mug.
Allison hadn’t ordered it.
Molly didn’t say a word. She just touched the edge of the table lightly with two fingers, the way you might touch someone’s shoulder, and went back to the counter.
Allison looked at the cinnamon roll. It was the same kind she had left for Shane on her third day in Merrybrook, beside his forgotten travel mug, without a note.
She wrapped both hands around her coffee and took a sip.
It tasted like coffee.
Just coffee. Hot and dark and ordinary. For the first time since she had walked through that door in August, there was nothing underneath it. No rainy afternoon. No someone coming home. It tasted like coffee from any café in any town where nobody knew her name.
She set it down.
She turned her phone over. The message was still there, like it was waiting for her.
hi
She hated that it was still working on her. That was the worst part. Not the message. The message was nothing. Two letters from a man who had never once in two years put more effort into anything than he absolutely had to. The worst part was that her body still knew the shape of this. Her stomach still knew exactly how to drop. Her fingers still knew how to hold the phone a little too tight. There was a whole version of her that had been built around waiting for this man to text, and she had thought she’d torn that version down to the studs, and it turned out it had just been sitting in the dark all this time, waiting for someone to flip the switch.
She remembered, suddenly and against her will, how it used to go.
The texts at eleven forty-seven at night. wyd. Never a plan. Never a question he actually wanted answered. Just a door cracked open, and her walking through it every single time. Driving across the city in the rain because he was bored. Leaving his apartment before he woke up because he didn’t like mornings, or said he didn’t, and she had never been brave enough to ask whether he meant mornings in general or mornings with her. Her birthday, which he forgot until nine that night and then turned into a joke. His friends, who called her Ryan’s friend Allison for two whole years because he never once corrected them.
Checking her phone forty times a day. Reading his messages like they were a code she could crack if she just tried hard enough. Making herself smaller and easier and quieter so he wouldn’t have a reason to leave, and him leaving anyway, because the problem had never been that she was too much. The problem was that he had never planned to stay.
She knew all of this. She had spent nine months knowing all of this.
And now here it was, two lowercase letters, and the walls of The Brook seemed closer than they usually did. The light through the window seemed thinner. The whole warm golden world she had been living in since August suddenly felt, for one awful minute, like something she had borrowed. Something that could be taken back.
Because that was what he did. That was what he had always done. He showed up right when she started being happy without him and reminded her of the version of herself who wasn’t.
