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And underneath that, quieter and so much worse, the old voice. The one she had been outrunning since the city.

What if Friday was just a nice night. What if the cabinet door was just a cabinet door. What if you are doing it again. Building an entire world out of one man and a few kind gestures, and one day he’s going to look at you across a table and read you the weather.

She knew that wasn’t true. She knew it the way she knew the lake was cold.

The fear did not care what she knew.

She picked up the phone.

She put it down.

She picked it up again.

She didn’t have to answer. She knew that. Becca would tell her not to answer. Lauren would tell her not to answer, and then would offer to answer for her, in all capital letters, with words that could not be printed in a school newsletter. Not answering was the grown thing, the healthy thing, the thing women did in articles about boundaries.

But something in her couldn’t leave it sitting there. Maybe it was manners. She had been raised to answer when someone spoke to her. Maybe it was the small ugly part of her that wanted to know what he wanted, whether he was sorry, whether he had finally figured out what he’d had and thrown away. Maybe it was just that it felt like an unlocked door behind her back, and she needed to know who was standing on the other side of it before she turned the lock.

She typed hey.

She deleted it. Hey was friendly. Hey was an invitation.

She typed what do you want.

She deleted it. That sounded like she cared about the answer.

She typed who is this and looked at it with a small, vicious kind of satisfaction, and then deleted that too, because she wasn’t that person. She didn’t want to become that person. Especially not for him.

She sat with the empty box and the blinking cursor.

She typed hi?

The question mark was the most honest thing she could manage. It said why. It said after all this time. It said what could you possibly think you’re allowed to say to me now.

She sent it.

The second it went she wanted it back. Her thumb actually moved, like she could reach into the screen and catch it.

Her phone buzzed before she had even set it down.

He answered in under ten seconds. In two years, he had never once answered her in under ten seconds.

wyd

Then, before she could breathe:

hru

Then a pause, long enough for her to think that was the end of it.

Then:

miss you

She sat very still.

A year ago she would have given anything for those two words. She had lain awake for them. She had written whole conversations in her head where he said them and meant them, where he showed up at her door and said them and she let him in. She had wanted miss you from Ryan Mitchell more than she had wanted almost anything in her life.

And here they were. Lowercase. Wedged between hru and nothing. Typed with the exact same effort as wyd.