EPISODE SIX: AUGUST WITHOUT A VOICE
I went back every Saturday in August. I want that on record, because there is a version of this story where a more sensible man would have stopped after the second empty bench, would have decided that four o'clock was simply four o'clock again, an ordinary hour with nothing owed to it. I was not that man. I sat there each week with the specific, humiliating patience of someone waiting for a bus that has already been cancelled, unwilling to be the one who admits it first.
I wrote things to her that I never sent, because there was nowhere to send them. I would draft, in the notes app on my phone, sentences that began I don't know if you can hear this and ended nowhere at all, then delete them before I'd finished, as though the act of writing and unwriting was its own kind of message, one that could travel somewhere even without a recipient. My phone, by the third week of August, held the ghost outlines of at least a dozen conversations I never had, each one a little more afraid than the last.
Work, which had never been the thing that made my life bearable, stopped even pretending to help. I sat through meetings about systems migrations and quarterly targets with the specific, hollow attention of a man performing competence rather than possessing it, and I understood, somewhere around the second week, that the emptiness I was carrying now had a shape it had never quite had before. My grief for Claire, whatever else it was, had never had a face. This did. This had a laugh I could still hear if I closed my eyes, a way of pausing before a joke that told you it was coming, a habit of saying my invented name like it amused her every single time. Losing that kind of silence is different from the general, ambient kind. It has edges. You keep cutting yourself on them.
It was Noah, oddly, who gave me the idea that finally moved me from waiting into looking, though he did not know he'd done it. He asked, in the particular blunt way he asks things when he has decided a friend needs shaking rather than comforting, whether the person I'd apparently been seeing had simply stopped answering, and if so, whether I had considered that some people just do that, disappear without explanation, and that the kindest thing I could do for myself was stop checking a phone that clearly wasn't going to ring.
I told him it wasn't like that. I did not tell him what it was actually like, because I did not yet have a sentence that wasn't going to end with him quietly reconsidering how much he trusted my judgment. But somewhere in his blunt, well-meaning wrongness was a splinter of something useful: if she had truly vanished the way people vanish, there would be evidence of a life continuing somewhere without me in it. If she hadn't, there would be something else. Either way, there was a version of the truth I could go looking for instead of simply waiting for it to arrive.
I started with everything I had once told myself I was too respectful to use.
I remembered, with a clarity that surprised me, every small, specific detail she had ever handed me freely, the ones I'd filed away without admitting, even to myself, that I was filing them for exactly this purpose. The smell of rain near a park with a view of an old station's domed roof. A mention, months earlier, of a small independent comics exhibition where she'd once knocked over an entire box of watercolors and spent the rest of the afternoon apologizing to a stranger's ruined shoes. The laugh in her voice the day she first heard the word protea and pretended, badly, to be offended by it.
I searched for the exhibition first, cross-referencing dates against anything she had mentioned about the season it happened in, and found, after several wrong turns, a small gallery's archived event page from over a year earlier, a listing of participating independent artists, most of them names that meant nothing to me, until one did not, until one sat there in a font no larger than any of the others, doing absolutely nothing to announce how completely it would rearrange the next several months of my life.
Sophie Collins.
I found her, after that, the way you find anything once you finally know what to call it, quickly, almost insultingly quickly given how many weeks I had spent circling the same information from a distance. An account, unlocked, ordinary, full of the small evidence of an actual, particular life: photographs of her laughing between two friends outside a pub, her hair exactly as she'd described it, coral and peach and pale gold catching a string of fairy lights behind her; a close-up of hands, unmistakably an artist's hands, ink-stained at the knuckle, holding up a finished page to the camera with visible pride; a post from several months back, casual in tone but unmistakable in its weight to anyone who'd been listening the way I had, saying only that she was working on something that felt like the most important story of her life, and that she hoped, when it was finished, it would be worth what it was costing her to make.
I read that sentence more times than I want to admit, turning the word costing over and over, trying to decide whether it meant something as ordinary as exhaustion or something I was not yet willing to let myself consider.
The most recent post was dated seven weeks earlier.
I sent a message that night. I do not remember, now, exactly what I wrote, only that it took me nearly an hour to produce four sentences, each of them a careful attempt to sound like a reasonable person and not a man who had fallen in love with a voice and was now standing, uninvited, at the edge of an actual life he had no permission to enter. I did not mention the four o'clock line. I did not mention Mr. Glenn. I only said I believed I might know her, that I hoped she was alright, and that I would very much like to hear from her whenever she was able.
Nothing came back. Not that night, not the next day, not by the end of that week.
I do not know, precisely, the moment I stopped waiting for a reply and started making a decision instead. I only know that by the second week of September I had already asked Noah to help me hand off what I could of my work, and that he did it without asking the questions he clearly wanted to ask, which is, I have come to understand, one of the more generous things a friend can do for you.
I bought a ticket the following day. Round trip, because some old, practical part of me still insisted on the fiction that I would need a return date, though I suspect I knew, even filling in the form, that the return half of that ticket was more of a formality than a plan.
The morning I left, I walked, out of some instinct I did not examine too closely, to the bus stop first, though there was nothing left there to say goodbye to, no hum of a half remembered song, no city on the other end of a line that no longer opened. I sat down anyway, for a few minutes, in the exact spot where all of this had started, and said her name out loud, for the first time, to no one, in an empty morning that did not answer back the way it once had.
"Sophie Collins," I said, and the words felt strange in my mouth, too solid, too plain, for a person I had spent five months loving as something closer to weather than to a woman with a full name and an actual address I still did not fully have.
I landed in London that evening with a scrap of a neighborhood, half remembered from a caption on one of her photographs, and no real certainty that it would lead anywhere at all. I had a hotel booked for a week. I had a return flight I already suspected, standing at the airport carousel waiting for a suitcase I'd packed without any real sense of how long I intended to stay, that I was not going to use.