EPISODE FIVE: A SUMMER THAT NEVER QUITE ARRIVED
I turned the promotion down on a Tuesday, in an email I rewrote four times before sending, each version slightly less apologetic than the last, as though I were negotiating my way down to a version of myself I could actually live with sending out into the world. I told my director the timing wasn't right. I did not tell him the timing in question was a Saturday afternoon that had, over three months, become the only appointment in my life I had never once considered missing.
It was, I think, the first decision I had made in longer than I could accurately count that was not built, in some quiet load-bearing way, around what would look reasonable on a resume or reassure a family that had long since stopped asking what I planned to do with the life they'd handed me. I did it for a woman whose real name I did not know, whose face I had never seen, who lived on the other side of an ocean and inside two hours of every Saturday, and if you had described that sentence to me a year earlier I would have recommended the man in it see someone qualified to help him.
I told Sophie that evening, half expecting her to find it as absurd as I did.
You said no, she repeated, and I could hear the smile before she'd said anything else. To a promotion. For this.
"For the schedule," I said, deflecting out of old habit. "The role required weekends."
Ryan.
"For this," I admitted.
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again there was something underneath the pleasure in her voice, something careful, the way a person sounds when they are happy about a gift and worried about what it might have cost the person giving it.
I'm glad, she said. I am. But I need you to hear this too. Don't make me the whole reason you're choosing anything. If I ever became the entire architecture of your life, and something happened to this, to us, to whatever this actually is, I don't want to be the reason the rest of it falls down with me.
I did not understand, then, how much of a warning that sentence actually was. I heard it, at the time, as the kind of thing careful people say to protect themselves from being blamed for someone else's choices, and I told her, honestly, that I wasn't rearranging my whole life around her, only the part of it that had never had anything worth arranging itself around in the first place.
She let that stand, though I have wondered since whether she believed me.
June, that year, felt like the first month in over a decade I did not spend waiting for something to be over. We talked about smaller things and larger ones with equal ease, the way people do once the scaffolding of a relationship has finally become sturdy enough to hold real weight. She asked me, one Saturday, what I would do if I could live anywhere, be anyone, with no one watching to report back on whether I was doing it correctly.
I told her the truth, which surprised me as much as it seemed to surprise her: I wanted, more than anything, to live somewhere no one knew my name. Not Sophie's kind of anonymous, the kind you choose and can end whenever you like, but the deeper kind, a life where no one had an opinion about who I was supposed to be, where I could fail at something small and ordinary without an entire family's expectations arriving to catalogue the failure.
That's the saddest ambition I've ever heard, she said, not unkindly. Wanting to disappear from people who are supposed to love you.
"What's yours," I asked, mostly to move the conversation away from mine.
I want to finish something that's actually mine, she said. Not client work, not somebody else's idea of what a comic should look like. My own story, start to finish, published under my own name, where none of the characters have to pretend they aren't afraid of anything. I'm tired of drawing brave people. I'd like to draw someone who's simply scared and still gets up in the morning anyway.
I did not know, when she said it, how close that sentence would come to describing exactly what she was doing every single Saturday, getting up, sitting down on a bench, and being afraid of something she had not yet told me, in a language brave enough that I mistook it for an artistic preference.
There were moments, that June and into July, when I came close to telling her I loved her. I want to be precise about this, because precision feels important now in a way it didn't at the time. I did not fail to say it because I doubted it. I failed to say it because saying it felt like it would turn something weightless into something with consequences, and some untrained instinct in me, the same one that had kept me from picking up a phone twelve years earlier, understood that consequences were the thing I feared most reliably in the world.
I think, now, she was circling something of her own in exactly the same way.
There was an evening, deep in July, when she went quiet in the middle of a sentence about nothing in particular, a story about a gallery opening she'd been asked to submit work for, and I heard her breath change before she spoke again.
I need to tell you something eventually, she said. I'm not ready yet. I need you to know that whatever I end up telling you, it isn't about you. It was never about you.
I asked her, carefully, if she was alright.
I'm tired, she said, and laughed in a way that did not quite reach the actual humor of a laugh. More tired than I'd like to admit to a man who thinks I'm the brave one in this arrangement.
I did not push. I have never forgiven myself, fully, for not pushing, though I understand, now, that pushing would likely have changed nothing about what came after, only the amount of time she had left to decide it on her own terms rather than mine.
By the last Saturday of July, the change in her was no longer something I could explain away as tiredness in the ordinary sense. Her voice came slower. She paused, mid-sentence, in places she never used to pause, as though gathering enough breath to finish a thought had become its own small task. When I asked if she was unwell, she deflected the way I had once deflected the question of the promotion, with a joke that didn't quite land and a change of subject that arrived a half second too quickly.
Near the end of that conversation, she said something I did not understand until much later, and have never been able to entirely stop hearing since.
If I ever stop coming, she said, I need you to promise me something. Don't turn the silence into evidence that you did something wrong. Whatever happens, it was never you.
"What are you talking about," I said, sharper than I meant to, frightened in a way I did not yet have the vocabulary to name. "Sophie, what is that supposed to mean?"
She laughed again, softer this time, genuinely fond even through whatever she was carrying. Nothing ominous, Mr. Glenn. I only mean the city is still beautiful even on days someone doesn't have the strength left to look at it properly. I wanted you to know that, in case I ever have one of those days.
I did not believe her. I do not think she expected me to.
At six o'clock that evening, with only minutes left before the line would close on its own, she said, quickly, as though she'd been building up to it the entire conversation and had run out of hour before she'd run out of courage, There's something I need to tell you. I want to. I just need a little more time to say it properly.
"Tell me now," I said. "Whatever it is."
I can't. Not like this. Not in two hours a week, in pieces. Give me until next time.
The connection ended before I could answer her, cut off by the same clean, arbitrary six o'clock it always obeyed, leaving me with a promise I had no way to hold her to and a week I would spend turning her sentence over so many times it stopped sounding like words at all.
The following Saturday, I sat down on the bench at four o'clock exactly, the way I always did, already composing, without meaning to, the first thing I planned to say to her.
There was nothing. No hum of a half-remembered song, no voice arriving uninvited inside my own skull, only the ordinary, indifferent noise of a city that had never once cared whether I was waiting for something, and that afternoon, for the first time since March, did not seem inclined to make an exception.