I Spent Ten Years Loving a Man Who Never Existed

I checked my phone again at the arrivals gate.

The message was still there. I'd read it so many times the words had stopped looking like words.

*I keep thinking about what you said last week. About how you always save the window seat for me on road trips. I don't think you know what that does to me, Lea.*

Garrett had sent that four days ago. I'd read it in the library, between a stack of flashcards and a cold cup of coffee, and I'd had to press my hand flat against the table just to stay in my seat.

Ten years. Ten years of being the girl who waited, who made herself smaller, who laughed at the right moments and never asked for too much. And then, three months ago, the messages started changing. They got softer. More specific. The kind of specific that means someone has been paying attention.

I told myself not to read too much into it. I told myself that a hundred times.

I read it again anyway.

The arrivals board flipped. London Heathrow, landed. I smoothed the front of my jacket — navy, the one Bailee said made me look like I had my life together — and watched the doors.

He came through with a rolling carry-on and a tan that London had no business giving him. Tall, easy in his body, the kind of person a room notices. Garrett Johnston, exactly as I'd carried him in my head for a decade.

He saw me and smiled. Not the big smile. The small one, the one I used to think was just for me.

'Hey, you.' He pulled me into a one-armed hug, the kind that ends before you're ready. 'You didn't have to come all the way out here.'

'I wanted to,' I said.

He was already looking at his phone.

---

The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old leather. Garrett sat beside me scrolling through something, and I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the highway unspool toward the city. The skyline came up slow and gray and enormous, the way it always does, like it's reminding you of your size.

I took out my phone and opened the messages again.

*You're the only person I've ever been able to just sit with. You know that?*

He'd sent that one on a Tuesday. I'd been in the middle of a study session with Soren — Bailee's cousin, who'd been quietly helping me prep for finals for the past few months — and I'd had to excuse myself to the hallway just to breathe.

I glanced at Garrett. He was still on his phone. His jaw was relaxed. He looked like a man with nothing on his mind.

'You seem good,' I said.

'Yeah.' He didn't look up. 'London was good.'

I turned back to the window. The pine air freshener was too sweet. I cracked the window an inch and watched the city get closer.

---

The restaurant was loud and warm and smelled like sesame and charcoal. A trendy Korean BBQ spot in Koreatown — Garrett had picked it, texted me the address an hour before his flight landed. The kind of place with exposed brick and low lighting and a grill built into every table.

She was already there.

I didn't know who she was at first. Just a woman at the table, dark-haired, with the particular posture of someone who has decided in advance that she is the most interesting person in the room. She looked up when we walked in and smiled at Garrett with the ease of someone who had been waiting for him, not us.

'Lea,' Garrett said, pulling out a chair, 'this is Francesca.'

Francesca Holmes extended her hand across the table. Her nails were perfect. Her smile had something behind it I couldn't name yet.

'I've heard so much about you,' she said.

The meat went on the grill. The conversation moved around me — London, a gallery they'd visited, someone named Oliver who was apparently hilarious. I ate and nodded and tried to locate the feeling I'd had at the arrivals gate, the one that had felt so close to certainty.

Garrett sat relaxed and distant, chopsticks in hand, laughing at something Francesca said. He hadn't looked at me directly since we sat down.

Francesca leaned forward.

'Can I ask you something, Lea?' Her voice was light. Conversational. 'How long have you been texting Garrett?'

I looked at her. 'A few months, I guess. Since September.'

'Mm.' She tilted her head. 'And what did you think of his messages? The sweet ones.'

Something cold moved through my chest.

'They were—' I stopped. 'They were really—'

'Because those were me.' She said it the way you'd say *pass the salt.* 'His old phone. I found it in a drawer back in October and thought, why not? We called it the Childhood Friend Takedown.' She smiled. 'You were very easy to string along, honestly. You wanted it so badly.'

The grill hissed. Someone at the next table laughed.

I looked at Garrett.

He was looking at the grill. Chopsticks still in his hand. His face was completely, perfectly still.

He didn't look up.

---

I stood up. My chair scraped back and I didn't care.

'Ten years.' My voice came out steadier than I expected. 'I spent ten years loving someone who never existed. And you—' I looked at Garrett, and he finally looked at me, and there was nothing there, just a faint discomfort, like I was a scene he wanted to be over. 'You sat there. You just sat there.'

He opened his mouth.

'Don't.' I picked up my bag. 'I don't know you. I don't think I ever did.'

I walked out.

The cold hit me on the sidewalk like a wall. Manhattan kept moving — cabs, voices, someone's music bleeding from a window above — and I stood on the pavement and felt the ground tilt slightly under my feet.

My legs were shaking. I pressed my back against the brick and looked up at the sky, which was the particular orange-gray of a city night, and tried to remember how to breathe.

A car pulled up to the curb.

The door opened and Soren Edwards stepped out.

I knew him as Bailee's cousin. The quiet one who showed up at our apartment with textbooks and never stayed longer than the work required. The one who never rushed me when I was thinking, who asked follow-up questions about things I'd already forgotten I'd mentioned. I'd never once wondered why he was always exactly where I needed him to be.

He didn't ask what happened. He looked at me once — just once, the way you look at something you already understand — and then he turned and positioned himself between me and the restaurant door with a stillness that took up more space than it should have.

Behind me, I heard the door open. Garrett's voice: 'Lea—'

Soren turned his head. He didn't say anything. He just looked at Garrett with a calm so complete it had weight to it, and Garrett stopped talking.

Soren opened the passenger door.

I got in.

The city moved past the windows. My hands were in my lap. I was still shaking, finely, the way you shake when the adrenaline has nowhere left to go.

'You don't have to talk,' Soren said.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes.

For the first time in ten years, I let someone else hold the weight.

---

Bailee was awake when I got back.

The room was quiet. The overhead light was off, just the lamp on her desk, and there was a mug of tea on my nightstand that was still steaming. She looked up when I came in and didn't say anything, which was the kindest thing she could have done.

I sat on my bed.

I opened the messages.

*I keep thinking about what you said last week.*

I read it again. And again. My thumb kept scrolling up, compulsive and sick, looking for the seam — the moment where I should have known, where the warmth had a crack in it if I'd only looked.

My phone buzzed. Garrett's name.

Then again. Then again.

Bailee reached over without a word and turned my phone face-down on the nightstand. She sat beside me on the bed, close enough that our shoulders touched, and looked at the wall with me.

Outside, the city made its sounds. Somewhere below, a cab horn. A siren, far away, getting farther.

I didn't cry. I just sat there and felt the shape of ten years, and how small it looked now that I could finally see all of it at once.