EPISODE NINE: PROTEA AND MR. GLENN
I read the manuscript properly over the following days, a few pages at a time, the way you ration something you suspect you are not ready to finish. It was, in outline, a simple enough story. A girl who sat on a bench in one city at four o'clock. A man who sat at a bus stop in another, at the exact same hour, though neither city was ever named, drawn instead as two separate, deliberately unspecific worlds, connected by nothing the reader could point to except a shared clock and a shared, inexplicable ache. Neither character had a surname. Neither had a face fully rendered until well into the later pages, as though Sophie herself had not been able to decide, for a long time, how much of them she was allowed to make solid.
But the details. I recognized every one of them, the way you recognize your own voice played back to you, slightly strange in the replaying but unmistakably yours. A song hummed without an audience. A rule about never asking for names, drawn as a literal fence the girl builds and then, panel by panel, quietly dismantles one board at a time. A man counting something under his breath that the reader is never told the number of, though I knew, reading it, that the number was seventeen, and that I was the only person on earth who would ever recognize it as such.
"You started this in March," I said, when I finally set the last read page down.
"The week after," she said. "I didn't think you were real. I thought I'd finally cracked, and that the kindest thing I could do for myself was turn whatever was happening into a story before I lost my nerve and told a doctor about it instead." She smiled, faint and a little rueful. "It felt safer as fiction. If you turned out to be a delusion, at least I'd have a decent comic to show for it."
"And if I turned out to be real."
"Then I'd already fallen in love with a man I'd invented," she said, simply, without any of the deflection I might have expected from her a month earlier. "Before I ever knew his name. Before I knew anything real about him at all. I loved Mr. Glenn first, Ryan. The real version just happened to catch up to the character eventually."
It was the first time she had said my actual name aloud, and I felt it land somewhere just beneath my sternum, a small, specific weight I had been braced for and still was not fully prepared to carry.
I nearly told her everything then. I had the whole confession assembled, every piece of it, the bus stop, the search, the seven weeks of silence, the flight I'd told myself was round trip, and I opened my mouth to let it out the way you release something you have been holding too long to hold carefully anymore.
She stopped me before I could.
"Don't," she said, gently, but with enough certainty that I closed my mouth without needing to be asked twice. "Not like this. Not as a confession you make because you're afraid of running out of time to make it. I don't want the truth because we're scared. I want it because it's true. Can you just sit with me a while longer, without turning this into something you feel sorry for me about?"
I understood, hearing her, that she was not refusing the truth. She was refusing to let grief write the scene for us, refusing to let her illness be the reason any of it finally got said, as though love confessed under those conditions might come pre-contaminated with pity, indistinguishable, later, from a kindness performed for a dying woman rather than a truth simply arriving on schedule.
"Alright," I said. "Then let me tell you something else, and you can decide for yourself what it is."
She waited.
"I came to London to find you," I said. "Not an artist whose work I admired. You. Whoever you turned out to be. I didn't have a plan beyond that, which is not something I do, if you've gathered anything about me at all. And I want you to know that whatever this ends up being, you are the only reason I have wanted, in longer than I can accurately measure, to stop living the life I was living before."
She looked at me for a long moment, something moving behind her eyes that I could not fully name, grief and gladness occupying the same small space the way I have come to understand they often do near the end of things.
"Well," she said finally, the corner of her mouth lifting despite everything. "There it is. You finally said something true. Took you long enough, Mr. Glenn."
We spent the following weeks working. That is the plainest way I can describe it, though it does no justice to what those afternoons actually held. I corrected her lettering when her hand shook too badly to keep the words level on the page. She directed the final linework from a chair by the window, her voice growing thinner but her eye for a composition losing none of its precision, telling me to shift a panel border two millimeters left with the same exacting certainty she'd once used to insist I was reading a bus schedule out loud for fun.
Maya came by more often as the weeks went on, and though she never asked me directly how Sophie and I had met, I watched her arrive at her own conclusions the way people do when they have decided a question isn't theirs to ask, only theirs to notice the shape of. Sophie's parents, David and Elena, treated me with a careful, searching kindness at first, the kind extended to a stranger whose importance to their daughter they could see plainly and understand not at all. By the second week, David had started bringing me tea without being asked, which I understood, from a man who otherwise said very little, to be its own form of acceptance.
Sophie grew weaker in ways that were no longer possible to attribute to ordinary tiredness. She needed to stop more often mid-sentence, gathering breath the way a person gathers coins for something they are determined to still be able to afford. Some afternoons she could only work for twenty minutes before her hand refused to hold the pencil steady enough to trust the line. She pushed through it anyway, more often than any nurse or doctor in that hospital seemed entirely comfortable with, insisting, every time I suggested she rest instead, that rest could wait, the page could not.
It was an evening near the middle of October, the light gone early and grey outside her window, that she told me the thing she had apparently been circling for days.
"I'm not afraid of the story ending," she said. "I've made my peace with that part, mostly. What frightens me is you. Going back to New York. Becoming, eventually, someone who has nothing left to wait for again, the way you were before all this started."
"I won't," I said. "I'm not going back to that. Whatever happens here, Sophie, I'm not going back to being a man who only exists on a schedule."
She studied me, weighing the promise the way she weighed everything, carefully, as though sincerity itself needed proofreading before she'd trust it.
Then she reached up, slowly, the effort of the small motion visible in a way it would not have been months earlier, and pressed her palm against my cheek, her thumb resting just beneath my eye the way you might hold something you are afraid, gently, of dropping.
We did not kiss. I want to be exact about that, because I have turned the reason over many times since and still believe we were right. We both understood, I think without ever discussing it directly, that the first kiss between us needed to be a choice made in full possession of ourselves, not a reflex reached for because we were afraid of running out of chances to reach for it at all. Fear makes a poor architect for the moments that are supposed to matter most. We wanted ours built on something steadier than that, even if steadier meant waiting.
"I'll stay until the last page," I said instead, which felt, in that moment, like its own kind of vow, perhaps the only one either of us was fully ready to make. "Whatever that costs. Wherever it ends. I'm not leaving before the story is finished."
She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and I watched something in her shoulders ease, the particular relief of a person who has been carrying a fear alone and has finally been allowed to set part of its weight down.
"Good," she said, quiet, almost to herself. "Good."
We worked another hour after that, longer than her usual limit, both of us reluctant, in a way neither of us said aloud, to be the one who called the evening finished. It was past nine when her breathing changed, subtly at first, a catch in the middle of a sentence about a panel border that I mistook, for one terrible, stretched-out second, for her simply searching for a word.
It was not that.
Her hand went to her chest. Her next breath did not come the way breaths are supposed to, easily, without announcement, and within seconds the room filled with the particular, efficient chaos of trained people moving very fast toward someone they have been quietly expecting to need them.
I was pushed back from the bed, gently but firmly, by a nurse who had clearly done this exact motion more times than I wanted to imagine. I stood in the corridor outside, my hands empty, my heart doing something violent and useless in my chest, while machines were wheeled past me into the room and the door closed on a scene I had no part left to play in.
On the small table beside her bed, where I had set it down not twenty minutes earlier, the manuscript sat open to its second to last page.
The final one was still blank.