The phone stayed on the nightstand Saturday morning.
That sounds small. It wasn't. Every morning for the past two weeks I'd been doing the same thing picking it up, checking it, putting it back down like I hadn't just been looking for his name. This time I left it on the nightstand and made coffee first. Stood at the window. Let the morning be quiet.
And I thought about the room.
The way he'd said: my position hasn't moved. Then picked up his bag and left. No follow-up. No checking whether it had landed. He'd said the true thing and trusted me to do something with it.
That trust hadn't been asked for. He'd just extended it.
I stood there long enough for the coffee to go lukewarm and thought about what I'd been doing. Not to him to myself. The pullback had felt like protection. It alwa
