The Door I Locked

Chapter Fourteen: Aftermath

I went back to work on Monday the way I'd always gone back to work after anything — early, focused, determined to prove to myself that nothing could actually touch the life I'd built. For the first two days, it almost worked. I ran a leadership meeting I barely remember attending. I closed a deal I'd been chasing for months and felt nothing where I expected to feel triumph. I told Sofia I was fine every time she checked on me, and both of us understood, by the third or fourth time, that the word had stopped meaning anything at all.

It was the quiet hours that betrayed me — the drive home, the empty apartment, the specific unstructured minutes right before sleep when the armor I wore all day simply couldn't reach. I'd find myself back on that dance floor without meaning to go there, replaying the exact weight of his hand at my waist, the unfinished sentence in the garden, the rough edge in his voice when he said it's not the time. I hadn't asked what the time would be, or whether there'd ever be one. I told myself I didn't need to know. I told myself that most nights, lying awake, and believed it for shorter and shorter stretches each time.

Sofia came over on the Thursday after, unannounced, with a bottle of wine and the specific expression of someone who has decided enough time has passed for a conversation. She found me at my kitchen counter, laptop open, doing the thing I always did when I wanted to avoid feeling something — burying myself in numbers that didn't ask anything difficult of me.

"You've checked your phone four times since I got here," she said, pouring two glasses without asking. "And you haven't gotten a single text the whole time I've been sitting here."

"I'm expecting something from the Chicago office."

Maya." Just my name, the same way she'd said it seven years ago in a doorway I still sometimes dream about. "It's been five days. You built an entire company out of not needing anyone. I've watched you do it. I've been proud of you for it. But I also watched your face on that dance floor, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't."

I didn't have an answer ready, which was, itself, a kind of answer.

You don't have to do anything about it," she said, softer now. "I'm not telling you to call him. God knows there's history there I'm not going to pretend away in one conversation over wine. I just don't think you're actually fine, and I think you're going to keep telling everyone you are until something makes it impossible to keep saying it."

She left a few hours later, and I sat alone in my kitchen for a long time after, turning her words over. I told myself she was wrong. I told myself the dance had been exactly what it looked like — one song, for Theo, nothing more — and that whatever I was feeling in its aftermath was simply old wiring, nostalgia doing what nostalgia does, nothing that required action or explanation.

I believed that, mostly, until the knock came nine days after the wedding.

It was late, past nine, and I almost didn't answer — I'd stopped opening my door to unexpected knocks somewhere in my twenties, another small habit built out of caution I'd never bothered to examine. Something made me look through the peephole anyway. And there he was, standing in the hallway outside my apartment in a coat still damp from the rain outside, looking like a man who had talked himself into this exact moment and out of it several times over on the drive here.

I stood on the other side of that door for a long moment before I opened it. I want to be honest about that hesitation, because it tells you something true about where I actually was, underneath all the careful things I'd been telling Sofia and myself for over a week. I wasn't dreading what he might say.

I was terrified of how badly I wanted to hear it.