Page 8 of Coming Home

"Deal."

We hung up, and the room dissolved back into its stale, beige silence. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, staring at my hands. Camilla said that ending one chapter is how you start a new one. I was clinging to that today like a raft.

I reached for the remote and flipped on the television. I needed noise. Something louder than the inside of my own head.

I wasn't looking for him. But there he was.

Ralph filled the screen, sitting in an interview chair on ESPN. Even on the crappy motel television, he commanded the frame. Black shirt. Sharp jaw. Sunglasses indoors again. He sat easy, shoulders squared, like nothing in that room could touch him.

"It was an accident," Ralph was saying, his deep voice smooth and controlled. "I turned, and my arm connected with her during the post-race rush. It wasn't intentional. I reached out to her camp immediately to check on her, and I personally ensured she received VIP access to the finals as an apology. We've spoken, and she was gracious."

The anchor nodded, pivoting to the next question. I picked up my phone. The headlines were merciless. Arrogant prick. Bully with a gold medal. Typical entitled athlete. Classic PR cleanup.

I studied his face on the screen. The internet's version of him didn't fit the boy in my memories.

When I was twelve, a pet dove he'd raised from a hatchling died. Ralph had spent three hours in the garage finding the perfect shoebox, lining it carefully with layers of tissue paper and cotton balls so the bird looked like it was merely sleeping. He'd dug the grave himself in the backyard under the lemon tree while Theo and I watched from the porch steps, eating popsicles. And when the dirt covered the box, Ralph didn't just shed a few dignified tears. He broke down, sobbing so hard his whole body shook.

Theo had put a hand on his shoulder. I'd handed him my popsicle, because I was twelve and that was the only comfort I knew how to offer. He took it, still crying, and ate the whole thing. That was how the three of us worked.

Used to.

That was the Ralph I knew. The boy who walked me to my car after every late-night swim meet because the parking lots were dark and he refused to let me go alone. The boy who called me "Guppy" because I was the youngest on the national team and he thought it was the funniest nickname anyone had ever invented. I couldn't make that boy match the monster the media was trying to create.

I shut the TV off, the screen fading to black.

By eight o'clock, the sky had turned a bruised, swollen purple, and the smell of rain on hot asphalt was seeping through the window frame.

I took a cab to the apartment at the agreed time. The entire ride, I sat with my hands clasped in my lap, squeezing my own knuckles to keep the tremor from spreading. I'd been dreading this all week. Since the breakup, James had made one thing clear: I would come crawling back. He was so confident about it that he hadn't even bothered to be angry when I left. He'd just smiled, like he'd already read the ending and knew I hadn't.

The brick building looked identical. Same blue door. Same terracotta plant pot on the step that I used to water every morning before my shift. James hadn't moved it, but he hadn't watered it either. The leaves had curled inward and gone brown. Dying in slow motion. I had bought that plant at a nursery on Vermont Avenue the week we moved in. I'd named it Delilah, because naming things made me feel like I was building a life. Now Delilah was dead and I was standing on a doorstep I used to call home, shaking.

The living room lights were on. He was home.

I pressed the buzzer. My own heartbeat thudded in my ears.

Nothing.

I waited, the silence stretching out for a full minute. I pressed it again, holding it down longer, as if pressure could change anything.

The sky finally opened up. It started with drops that shattered against the concrete, and within minutes it turned into a torrential downpour. I stood there on the exposed step as the rain soaked straight through my jacket, plastering my hair against my neck and pooling in my shoes.

He wasn't going to open the door. He was inside, warm, probably sitting on the gray couch I'd helped him pick out, watching the television we used to fight over, and he was choosing this. Letting the weather do his dirty work. This was the routine. This was always the game. Make her wait. Make her beg in the cold until she feels so small that crawling back seems like her only option.

And what gutted me, the part that made me want to scream into the rain, was that a tiny voice in the back of my skull was whispering: See? He was right. You have nowhere else to go.

I stumbled backward off the step, wiping the blinding rainwater from my eyes with a trembling hand.

I tried Nadia. Straight to voicemail.

My thumb hovered over Theo's name in my contacts. My brother. The first person I used to call for literally everything, before I decided to burn my entire life to the ground. But I hadn't spoken to him in thirteen months, and calling him now, drenched and stranded on an ex-boyfriend's porch, was a portrait of everything I swore I'd never become. I couldn't let our first conversation in over a year be come rescue me.

I scrolled through the rest of the list. It was devastatingly short. I had pruned my life over the last three years, cutting off friends one by one because James had convinced me they were toxic, when really he just needed me alone and compliant. The loneliness wasn't abstract tonight. It was a body count. I could see exactly how few names I had left, and the number was savage.

A sharp chime from the phone. A red battery icon flashed in the corner. Three percent.

One call. Maybe. Before the screen went black and I was standing in the dark with nothing and no one.

My wet fingers slipped on the glass as I scrolled past names that didn't belong to me anymore. Former sponsors. Old training partners. Coaches from a life that felt like a movie I'd watched once and couldn't quite remember the ending of. And then my screen landed on a number I hadn't dialed in three years.