Owen didn't contact me for almost a month.
I liked the quiet. I also kept waiting for it to turn into something. A message. A request. An apology. The old pattern had trained me to treat every empty space as temporary, like the silence was only a pause before the next test.
I went to therapy. I worked on the exhibition. I bought a second chair for my table.
Then Marcus called me on a Tuesday evening.
"Are you free?" he asked.
"I'm at home."
"Can I ask you something without making you responsible for fixing it?"
"That depends on the question."
He laughed once, without much humor. "Owen told me he's thinking about asking you to a concert next week."
My first response was an involuntary tightening in my stomach. I waited for the second one.
"Why are you telling me?"
"He asked me wh
