“Nobody needs me at two in the morning anymore.”
I sat with that sentence the way you sit with a stone in your shoe, unable to ignore it once you’ve felt its shape. I thought of Greg checking the oil in Emma’s car before every road trip long after she’d learned to do it herself. Of him keeping Michael’s dead flashlight in the junk drawer for a decade because “it still works, technically.” Of the evening he stood in the doorway of Emma’s empty bedroom after she’d moved her last box out, saying nothing, for far longer than a doorway usually holds a person.
I had called all of that success. I was starting to understand I might have been answering a different question than the one he’d actually been asking.
“After Emma moved out,” Greg said, “you told me you’d finally remembered what it felt like to wake up because you were simply finished sleeping, instead of because someone needed you. You said it like it was a relief.”
