“Or you didn’t want to.”
She did not answer.
I returned to the living room and made the couch into a bed.
The blanket smelled of lavender.
For a long time, I lay awake beneath the glow of the streetlamp outside.
Around midnight, I heard Sophie crying.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Only enough for someone listening carefully to hear.
Every instinct told me to go to her.
But every lesson from our failure told me not to confuse my guilt with comfort she had not requested.
So I stayed where I was.
And I listened.
In the morning, she found me in the kitchen reading the medication schedule for the fourth time.
Her hair was flattened on one side, making her look younger and more fragile than she would have liked.
“You always read instructions like they’re riddles,” she said.
“They usually are.”
She smiled faintly, then winced as she sat down.
I poured tea and pretended not to notice her pain.
She looked at me over the mug.
“You can notice,” she said. “Ignoring it doesn’t make me feel stronger.”
I set the kettle down.
“All right. Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough that I’m glad you stayed last night.”
Those words stayed with me through breakfast.
They stayed with me during the slow walk down the block her doctor had recommended.
Ravenswood was bright with autumn color.
Children in knit hats kicked leaves near a school fence.
A dog barked from behind a gate.
Sophie moved slowly, one hand against her side, but her eyes followed everything with quiet hunger.
As if the world had become precious while she had been trapped in hospital sheets and machine sounds.
“I forgot how loud morning is,” she said.
“Cars?”
“Life.”
We stopped beneath a maple tree.
A red leaf landed on her sleeve.
She stared at it for a moment.
Then she smiled.
A real smile.
Small, tired, but real.
On the way back, Lena called.
Sophie put the phone on speaker because her hands were shaking too much to hold it.
“Are you safe?” Lena demanded.
Sophie closed her eyes.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Is he there?”
Sophie looked at me.
Then she looked at the red door of her building.
“Yes.”
There was a tight silence.
“Sophie, after everything—”
“After everything,” Sophie interrupted, “I had surgery and needed help. Ethan helped.”
“Help is easy when someone wants forgiveness,” Lena said.
I expected Sophie to defend me.
Instead, she said, “Maybe.”
That maybe followed us upstairs.
Back in the apartment, Sophie sat at the kitchen table, pale from the walk and the phone call.
“She isn’t wrong,” I said.
Sophie unwrapped a lemon drop slowly.
