The Sin Between Us

Chapter 7: Keep The Evening Open

I let it ring twice more before I picked it up, mostly because I didn't trust my own voice to come out normal on the first try.

"Hey," I said, and it came out steadier than I expected, which felt like its own small victory.

"Hey." A pause, some noise behind him…traffic, maybe, or wind, hard to tell through the line.

"You didn't answer the question."

"Which one."

"You know which one." His voice had that low, unbothered quality it always had, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it on me specifically.

"What's been loud in that head of yours, Hyacinth."

I sat down at the kitchen table again, slower this time.

"It's nothing you need to worry about from an ocean away."

"I didn't ask if I needed to worry. I asked what it was."

I didn't have an answer ready, and the silence on my end must have said as much, because he let it sit there for a second before he spoke again, softer.

"Fine," he said.

"Keep it. For now." An echo of June's exact words from lunch that same week, and I wondered, absurdly, if everyone in my life had simply agreed to let me have my secrets on a short leash.

"But you called me first this time. That has to mean something."

"It was one message about bread."

"You sent me an article about a restaurant in a city you've never been to, at eleven at night, after thirty-four days of nothing."

A short exhale that might have been a laugh.

"That's not nothing, Hyacinth."

I didn't answer that either, and this time he let me keep the silence without chasing it. We talked another few minutes about nothing that mattered, his flight back, whether the London rain ever let up, whether I'd eaten dinner, which apparently was a question everyone in my life had decided to ask me that week, and then he said goodnight in that same unhurried voice, my name folded into the end of it like punctuation, and the line went quiet.

I sat at the table a long time after that, phone face-down again, my coffee gone completely cold in the mug beside it.

Three more weeks slid by after that phone call, each one a little heavier than the last, though nothing about the days themselves changed. Work. Gym. June. Sunday dinners where his name still came up and I still said nothing worth repeating, careful now in a different way than before,not hiding the fact that something existed, just hiding the shape of it.

He was scheduled home on Thursday. My mother brought it up at Sunday dinner, spooning mashed potatoes onto my father's plate without looking at either of us.

"Jude's back this week," she said.

"Let's have everyone over Saturday, make a proper thing of it." My father said good, tell him to bring the wine, the good kind this time, not the stuff from the gas station he brought at Easter that nobody had the heart to finish.

My aunt said it's about time that man overworks himself into the ground, somebody ought to tell him to slow down before he runs himself into the dirt.

"You've clammed up," June told me later that same week, once I'd finally gotten around to mentioning any of it out loud, the way I told her most things eventually, in pieces, sideways, never straight on, like confession was a language I'd had to relearn from scratch after years of not needing it.

"Ever since that party, you go quiet the second his name comes up. I've noticed. I notice everything, it's my whole personality, it's why you keep me around."

"What exactly do you want me to say."

"The real thing. Just once. Even if it's only ever to me, in this booth, where it doesn't have to go anywhere else, where nobody's grandmother is going to hear it over dessert."

I didn't have an answer for that either, so I gave her the same nothing I'd given my family at Sunday dinner, and she let it sit between us like she always did, patient in a way that felt more like waiting me out than giving up on the question entirely.

I sat through that Sunday dinner and said nothing at all, while inside I was ticking off the days to Thursday the exact same way I used to count down to Christmas morning as a kid, lying awake doing the math on hours instead of days once it got close enough that hours made more sense than days did.

Wednesday night, the night before his flight was set to land, my phone lit up on the nightstand.

A photo, no caption at first.

Him in a window seat, the dark pressed flat against the glass beside him, one small overhead light glowing above his head, the rest of the cabin dim behind it, everyone else asleep or pretending to be.

Nothing else in the frame. Just a man on a plane at night, headed somewhere, the kind of photo you only send someone if you want them to know exactly where you are and exactly what you're thinking about while you're there, without having to say either part out loud.

Headed home.

The caption came a beat later, one line, no punctuation wasted on softening it

Landing tomorrow. Keep Thursday evening open.

I read it three times before I let myself smile, and even then I did it alone, in the dark, like the smile itself was something that needed privacy, something that couldn't survive being witnessed.

Then I started typing a reply, deleted it, started again, deleted that one too, and finally sent the only honest thing I had left in me, stripped down to five words because anything longer would have given too much away:

“Wasn't planning on filling it anyway.”