He answered the ones that mattered and left the rest for morning.
Stephanie’s things were near the door.
He left them there.
He was not angry. He was not broken. He was not performing a recovery he had not yet had.
He was simply, cleanly, on the other side of something that had needed to end.
The disclosure he had been waiting sixteen years to make was made. The relationship that had needed to conclude had concluded. The people who had a right to the truth had received it.
And Nick, who had walked into a doctor’s office at twenty with a life ahead of him and walked out carrying a weight he had never quite learned to set down — Nick had set it down.
Not all at once. Not without cost. Not without the particular kind of loss that comes from finally seeing something you loved accurately.
But down.
And the air, outside the venue in the afternoon light and later that night in the quiet of the apartment, felt different in his lungs.
Lighter.
Like the beginning of something that finally, actually belonged to him.
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