CHAPTER ONE
2:13 a.m.
The phone is the only thing in the apartment that still believes in light.
Eli lies on the couch in the exact same spot he’s occupied for the last four hours, one arm flung over his eyes, the other dangling off the edge like a man overboard who stopped fighting the current a long time ago. The screen on the coffee table glows a cold, judgmental blue. 2:13 a.m. stares back at him, unblinking.
There is an unsent voice note in their chat. Thirty-seven seconds long. He knows because he’s played it eleven times, volume so low it’s barely more than the memory of sound.
He thumbs it again.
Just breathing. His own. Slow, careful, like he was trying not to wake someone who was never there.
He can still taste the rooftop on his tongue: city air and the faint metallic bite of fear. Six hours ago he finally said the words he’d been carrying since sophomore year like a bullet lodged too close to the heart to remove.
I’m in love with you.
He’d expected explosion, annihilation, something cinematic.
Instead he got the softest rejection in human history.
He closes the message before he can hit send for the twelfth time. Locks the phone. Unlocks it. Locks it again. The cycle of a man who has run out of prayers but can’t stop mouthing them anyway.
The apartment is a museum of her.
A black hair tie on the coffee table, stretched out from years of being twisted around her wrist when she’s thinking. It still smells like coconut if he lifts it to his face, which he does sometimes when he’s sure no one will ever know.
Three hoodies (his) folded into the armchair like nesting dolls. She has stolen seventeen in total; these are just the ones she forgot to take home.
A Polaroid from their first road trip pinned to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a tiny cactus. In the photo she’s asleep against his shoulder, mouth open, one hand curled into the fabric of his shirt like even unconscious she was afraid he’d leave.
He hasn’t looked directly at the photo all night. He turned it facedown after the third whiskey. It didn’t help.
2:14 a.m. arrives with the mercy of a guillotine.
The screen lights up.
Lena.
Two words, no punctuation, the way she texts when her hands are shaking.
You still up?
His heart does the thing it’s done every single time her name has appeared on his phone for the last eight years: stops, stutters, then sprints hard enough to bruise ribs.
He types: Yeah.
Deletes it.
Types: Always.
Deletes it.
Types: Define “up.”
Deletes it.
Types: Can’t sleep.
Hits send before cowardice can win again.
The typing bubbles appear, vanish, appear again. Then the call comes through.
He answers on the first ring, voice already cracked open.
Forty-three seconds of silence thick enough to drown in.
“Hi,” she says finally, so small he can barely hear her.
“Hi,” he answers, and it sounds like surrender.
Another silence. He can hear her breathing, quick, uneven, the way it gets when she’s trying not to cry. He knows every cadence of her sadness the way sailors once knew stars.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” she whispers.
“I’m sorry I ruined everything.”
“You didn’t ruin anything.” A pause long enough to die in. “You’re still my favorite person.”
He laughs, and it comes out wet. “Pretty sure that’s my line.”
“Eli…”
“I know,” he says quickly, because he does. He always has. “I know.”
She makes a sound like she’s been holding her breath for six hours and is only now remembering how lungs work. “Please don’t hate me.”
“Lena.” His voice breaks on her name the way it always does when it matters. “I could never hate you. That’s the whole problem.”
The line goes quiet again, but it’s different now: softer, warmer, the kind of quiet they used to live inside before tonight turned it radioactive.
“We just… pretend it didn’t happen, okay?” she says, pleading. “We go back. I can’t lose you, Eli. I won’t survive it.”
He closes his eyes. Sees the rooftop again. Sees the way she looked at him like he was both the safest place she’d ever known and the most dangerous thing she’d ever touched.
He thinks: I love you so much I will let you keep hurting me if it means you stay.
“Okay,” he says. “We’ll pretend.”
“Thank you,” she breathes, and it sounds like relief and grief having a baby.
They talk for twenty more minutes about nothing: work tomorrow, the barista who spelled her name “Leena” again, whether the new Thai place is worth the hype. Safe topics. Landmine-free. The way they’ve done a thousand times before.
When the conversation thins out, she says, “Night, E.”
“Night, Len.”
Neither of them hangs up.
He listens to her breathe for nineteen more seconds. Counts every one like rosary beads.
She’s the first to go.
The apartment falls back into its museum silence.
Eli opens the voice note again. Presses record.
This time he speaks, barely louder than the dark.
“I will always answer at 2:14 a.m. Even when it kills me.”
He saves it. Drafts. Forever unsent.
He turns the phone face-down, pulls one of her hoodies over his chest like armor that never actually protected anything, and stares at the ceiling until the microwave clock clicks over to 3:00.
Seven hours until brunch.
Seven hours until he has to sit across from her, smile like his heart isn’t bleeding quietly onto the floor, and pretend the world didn’t end tonight.
He closes his eyes.
Somewhere across the city, she’s probably doing the exact same thing.
