"Same thing."
Uncle Enzo asked Wes if he was Italian. Aunt Maria asked if he liked cannoli. David, true to form, said nothing and ate a meatball. My mother shouted over everyone to ask if Wes needed a care package, because he looked thin, which was objectively insane because Wes was two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and scar tissue.
Wes lasted twenty-three minutes.
I know because I checked the call timer afterward, searching for the precise moment when it had gone wrong. Twenty-three minutes of my family operating at full Italian capacity, and then Wes stood up and said "excuse me" and walked to my bathroom and closed the door.
I found him sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his hands on his knees, breathing in the deliberate, controlled way of a man managing something that was not a panic attack but was adjacent to one.
"Hey," I said from the doorway. "You okay?"
"I need a minute."
"Take all the minutes you need."
"Your family is very loud."
"I know."
"And very warm."
"I know."
"I have never experienced anything like that. My family is three people who eat dinner in silence and communicate through nods." He looked at his hands. They were not shaking. They were just still, resting on his knees, and the stillness was the held-breath kind. The kind I'd seen in the first week of the rehab routine, when he was suppressing his response to being touched. "I don't know how to be in a family that size. I don't know the rules. I don't know how to jump into a conversation or answer seven questions at once or respond when someone's mother tells me I look thin when I am visibly not thin."
"You don't have to know the rules. There are no rules. That's the point."
"Everything has rules."
"Not this. My family runs on chaos and food and unconditional volume. You don't have to perform. You just have to be there."
He was quiet. The bathroom was small and the light was harsh and this was not the romantic setting I had imagined for any conversation about our respective families, but romance was not a genre Wes operated in. Wes operated in the genre of real, and real happened in bathrooms and parking lots and equipment rooms and all the unglamorous spaces where life actually took place.
"I think I need to go," he said.
"Okay."
"Not from us. From here. Tonight. I need to be in my apartment where it's quiet and I can think."
"Okay."
"I'm not running."
"I didn't say you were."
"Your face says it."
He was right. My face was saying it because my body was saying it because the part of me that remembered Ryan, that remembered being left after moments of vulnerability, was sounding every alarm in my system. He's pulling away. He's overwhelmed. You're too much. Your family is too much. You are, as always, too much.
I did not say any of this. I swallowed it and tasted the acid of old fear and said, "Go home. Take your time. I'll be here."
He left. The apartment was very quiet after the Moretti volume and the Wes silence, a double absence that made the rooms feel larger and emptier than they were. I sat on the couch where we'd sat together twenty minutes earlier and pressed my palms against my eyes and breathed.
He wasn't Ryan. He wasn't running. He was processing, which was different, which was healthy, which was exactly what a man who had never experienced a large, warm, chaotic family would need to do after being ambushed by one.
I knew all of this. I believed all of this. And still the wound throbbed.
Sofia called thirty seconds after the family call ended. "What happened? Where did he go? Is he okay? Are you okay?"