He had held me when I cried and made me sandwiches when I was too tired to eat and told me I could do anything. He’d been the person who convinced me I didn't have to live out of a bag. And then he had stood in an alley last night with his hands on another woman.
And now he was standing in our kitchen, hungover and hollow, offering me his blessing like it was a consolation prize.
"Are you serious right now?" My voice came out louder than I meant it to. "That's what you've got?"
"Maddie—"
"No." I set my coffee down on the counter. "What is this, Jack? What are you doing?"
He looked at the floor. When he spoke his voice had dropped, gone quiet in a way that wasn't quite steady. He sounded small, like a miniature of himself. "I'm no good for you."
I laughed, and it came out wrong, too sharp and too short. "Who decided that?"
"Maddie—"
"Because I don't remember being asked. I don't remember sitting down and agreeing to any of this." My voice had gone somewhere past anger into something colder. "I remember the three years we spent together. I remember what I saw in that alley. And I remember who put himself there."
He didn't say anything.
"You don't get to decide that for me." My voice gained a strange, steady edge. "You don't get to blow everything up and then stand there telling me it's for my own good like you did me some kind of favor."
"I'm just saying you deserve?—"
"Stop." I held up my hand, palm out, a wall between us. "Stop telling me what I deserve. I know what I deserve. What I deserved was a conversation. What I deserved was you picking up the phone." My voice cracked on that and I hated it, hatedthat he was getting to hear it. "I waited for you all day, Jack. I spent the best day of my life waiting for you to show up for it. And you never did."
Something was building in my chest that I didn't trust myself with.
"I know," he said. Like it cost him something. "I'm sorry."
"Are you?"
He looked up at me then, and I saw it—whatever was sitting behind his eyes that he couldn't or wouldn't put into words. Something that looked almost like the truth. For a moment I thought he was going to say it. I thought:here it is, here's the thing, here's what actually happened and why, and maybe it won't fix anything but at least it'll be real.
He didn't. He just swallowed the words, pulling them back down into that dark place inside his mind.
"You're going to be okay," he said, like he was reading from a script. "You're going to be more than okay."
I looked at him for a long moment. The red eyes, the slept-in clothes, the thing he was carrying that he couldn't put down and apparently couldn't explain. He looked broken in a way I recognized: the specific, dangerous look of someone who’d decided something terrible about themselves and mistaken the decision for fate.
I'd grown up around that look. I knew what it meant. It meant he was gone already, had been gone maybe before he ever walked through the door, and nothing I said in this kitchen was going to reach him.
I picked up my duffel.
"Take care of yourself," I said. And I meant it—the way you mean something when you've already let it go. "Okay? Just—take care of yourself, Jack."
Something moved across his face. He nodded once, barely.
I picked up my duffel and walked past him to the door.
The hallway felt smaller than usual, the walls closer. I took the stairs too fast and had to slow down at the bottom, my lungs burning with the sudden need for a different kind of air. Outside, the morning was pale and still, the kind of early that feels like the world hasn't decided anything yet.
I thought about the kitchen floor yesterday. The laughing and the crying and the letter in my lap. I'd been right that something had cracked open. I just hadn't known which thing. I’d thought it was the start of the world, but it was just the shell breaking.
The cab came. I told him the airport, and as we pulled away I looked back at the building once—the window, the gap in the frame we'd stuffed with a dish towel and called fine. We had been masters of "fine." We’d built a whole kingdom out of things that were almost enough.
Then I faced forward.
I had a letter in my bag with my name on it. I had Baltimore. That was enough to start with. That was more than I'd ever had before.