I can’t trust you.
She’d forgotten that wary look. The man she’d met that day—the feral creature she’d shared tacos with—that wasn’t who he’d been this past week. She hadn’t realized that Ben had lost so much of his armor until he put it back on.
You waited too long. You had a chance, and you missed it.
Her mother shoved at her shoulder. “Take it in the corridor.”
“Hi,” Dan said.
May let herself be pushed. Out of the room. Away from Ben’s accusing eyes, her sister’s anger, Matt’s bewildered posture in the doorway. Her mother closed the propped-open door to the reception area so that May was alone with the water fountain and the oil portrait of a woman in pearls.
Alone with her cowardice. And Dan.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” Dan said again, and then he chuckled, embarrassed.
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Oh. You’re not coming?”
“I … no. I can’t leave town. The GM basically ordered me to stay put. I feel bad, though. I want to see you.”
“Don’t feel bad. We broke up.”
“You broke up with me, May. I didn’t break up with you.”
It actually only takes one person.
Cold air blasted onto her shins from a vent, and cold shame made her wrap her arms around herself. She pushed her way into the women’s bathroom, seeking enclosure. Warmth.
“You played a good game on Thursday.”
He made a noise, blowing air out through his nose. “Nah. I didn’t have my head in it.”
“Sorry.”
“S’okay. It’s my fault, May. I know I already told you I’m sorry about the charity lunch thing, but maybe I didn’t tell you right. I botched that proposal, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s all on me, what happened. But I don’t care about what you did and all the stuff people are saying about you and me. I’m not sure what else you need me to say, but just tell me, and I’ll say it.”
“There isn’t anything you can say.”
“There has to be.”
“No. There doesn’t.”
The bathroom was white-tiled, empty, the beige stall doors all partially or completely open. There was no comfort in this room. No easy way to say what she needed to say.
The problem, Dan, is that you don’t know what you said wrong. You can’t know, because I’ve only ever shown you one version of me, and it’s the wrong one.
The problem is that he sees me—the person I truly am—and you don’t. Because I let him see. I never let you.
And even if he leaves for good, I have to learn to be that person he sees. I have to decide whether I’m going to be her all the time, or whether I’m going to settle for less, even knowing I could have had more.
That’s the lesson of New York. That I get to choose. Not whether to walk off the cliff, but whether to fall. Whether to believe I can hold myself up.
“I met someone,” she said, and it felt terrible to say it. Scary in a way that nothing had ever been. “Someone important.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“His name is Ben.”
“How’d this—what are you saying?”
“I met him at a bar. After I left the apartment. I got mugged, and he bought me a drink.”
“You got mugged? You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez, May, are you okay?”
“Yeah. That’s not important. But Ben and I—actually, I’m not sure what we are, to be honest. The thing is, Dan …”
The thing was, it was hard, telling someone how you really felt. Hurting someone who cared about you.
The thing was, she’d been unfair to him when he proposed. Maybe understandably, because the words he’d said reflected back all the truths she hadn’t been admitting to herself—every fear about how he saw her and what she had made herself become in order to keep him.
He’d put his heart on his sleeve for her in a room full of people, and she’d stabbed him in it.
Sometimes, she fell into the habit of thinking Dan wasn’t smart, when, in fact, he just wasn’t particularly good at people. Emotions confused him, but he could memorize all the endless variations in a playbook without apparent effort.
Even if his proposal had sucked, he’d given her four years of his free time, his confidence, his hopes, his body. He’d patiently waited a year while she dithered about moving away from Wisconsin, then paid off her mortgage so she’d always have a place to go home to. He’d rented an apartment in Manhattan so they could have a getaway of their own, separate from the team.
Dan had deserved more from her than a three-sentence note. He’d deserved an explanation. A phone call. Ten phone calls, if that was what it took.