Say Uncle

What we don't say

The photo was on my phone like a small, quiet secret.

I looked at it more than I should have. Just a sky, the kind you can see anywhere. But he'd taken it in the driveway of my grandparents' house after a whole evening of saying almost nothing to me, and he had sent it to me and nobody else, and that meant something I wasn't ready to say out loud.

Sunday morning. I'd stayed over in the guest room. I came downstairs early expecting to have the kitchen to myself.

Caden was at the table.

Coffee in front of him, newspaper open, easy. He looked up, said good morning, went back to his paper. My grandmother was at the stove. I sat down across from him because there was nowhere else and she put a mug in front of me without asking and the three of us sat in the quiet kitchen together like it was normal.

It wasn't normal. Not to me.

The rest of the family came down around seven-thirty and swallowed the quiet up with noise and food and my grandfather's opinions about the news. I was grateful for the noise. It gave me somewhere to put my eyes that wasn't across the table.

I was only partially successful.

"You've been staring at Uncle Caden for like twenty minutes."

My cousin Bri said it low, right next to my ear. She was smiling, amused, but not suspicious. Just catching me doing something she found mildly funny. No weight behind it at all.

"I was thinking," I said.

"Sure." She went back to her eggs.

I held my mug with both hands and stared at the table and felt the heat crawl up my neck. Bri teased everyone. It was her whole personality. She didn't mean anything by it. She'd already forgotten she'd said it.

But I couldn't forget it.

Because if she'd seen it , even as a joke, even as nothing , it meant it was sitting on my face. And if it was sitting on my face it was more real than I'd been letting it be. And if it was that real, I had a problem I couldn't keep calling almost-nothing.

I got through the rest of the morning. Helped clean up, hugged my grandmother too long at the door, answered my mom's questions about whether I needed anything from Costco.

Caden caught me in the hallway putting my shoes on.

Just the two of us. Everyone else still in the back of the house.

"I have a project," he said. "London. I fly out Thursday."

My chest suddenly felt heavy. "How long?"

"Eight weeks. Maybe a little more."

I nodded. "That's a long time."

"It is."

We looked at each other. He was doing the right thing , I could see it in the set of his jaw, the measured distance he was keeping, the way he was holding himself still. He had thought about this. He'd decided. He was going to London and he was going to let eight weeks and an ocean close whatever this was before it became something we couldn't take back.

It was the sensible thing. The responsible thing.

I hated it.

"Safe travels," I said.

"Take care of yourself."

He left. I finished lacing my shoes. Drove home. Sat in my car in the parking lot of my apartment building for ten minutes before I could make myself go upstairs.

I made tea I didn't drink. I sat on my couch. I opened the photo of the sky and looked at it again.

Eight weeks.

I told myself it was enough time to get my head straight. Enough time to remember who he was and who I was and what the shape of our family looked like and why none of this made any sense. Eight weeks was a gift. A reset. I should be relieved.

I wasn't relieved at all.

At eleven that night, my phone lit up the room.

A photo. A city skyline through a floor-to-ceiling hotel window, vast and lit up and dark, a whole city going about its business without knowing it was being watched. Beautiful in that particular way that cities are beautiful at night, all that life compressed into light.

Edinburgh.

I knew it before I even looked it up because I had described it exactly once. Fourteen months ago, at my grandmother's kitchen table, while the family argued about where to go for the holidays. I'd said: I've always wanted to see Edinburgh at night. The lights look like something out of a movie. The family had moved on to arguing about beach versus mountains and I'd let it go and never mentioned it again.

He had already changed his plans. Already flown through. And from that hotel room with that view the first thing he did was take a photo and send it to me.

No words. No message. Nothing.

Just: I remembered.

My hands weren't entirely steady when I screenshotted it.

I put my phone down on the nightstand. Lay in the dark. Thought about a man who was trying to do the right thing and kept doing this instead. Thought about myself, lying here screenshotting it, keeping it, wanting more.

Eight weeks, I told myself.

My phone buzzed.

I picked it up.

One message.

Five words. "Get some sleep, good girl."I read it three times. My face was warm. My stomach did this weird little twist, and I immediately decided I wasn't going to think about it. He had never called me that before. I put the phone face down on the nightstand and pressed my hands over my face in the dark. I didn't sleep for a long time.