I Spent Ten Years Loving a Man Who Never Existed

Wednesday afternoons, the coffee shop on the edge of campus was mine. That was the deal I'd made with myself — one corner, one table, the one by the radiator that clicked and hissed but kept the cold out. Nobody from my usual orbit came here. That was the point.

Soren was already at the table when I arrived. He had his laptop open and a second coffee sitting across from him, still steaming. He didn't look up when I sat down, just slid my cup toward me and said, 'The intro paragraph is burying the argument. You want it in the first three sentences, not the fifth.'

I pulled out my draft. 'Good morning to you too.'

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost.

We worked like that for a while — him reading, me revising, the radiator doing its thing. Outside, the sky was the flat white of a November that hadn't decided whether to snow yet. I was in the middle of rewriting my thesis sentence when the door opened and the cold came in with it.

I felt it before I saw him. Some old reflex, ten years in the making.

Garrett scanned the room. His eyes found me the way they always had — like I was a landmark, something fixed and reliable. He started toward the table.

Soren didn't look up. He turned a page in my draft and made a small mark in the margin. 'This transition,' he said, tapping the paragraph, 'is doing too much work. Split it.'

I looked at the paragraph. I looked at Garrett, who had slowed, who was reading the situation — Soren's complete indifference, my attention on the page, the absence of any opening he could step into.

I looked back at the paragraph.

'Here?' I asked, pointing.

'One sentence earlier,' Soren said.

I made the cut. The paragraph breathed better immediately. I could feel Garrett standing somewhere behind me, waiting for me to turn around, waiting for the moment I'd acknowledge him and give him the foothold he needed.

The moment didn't come.

After a while — I didn't count the minutes — I heard the door open again. The cold came in, then went.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

Soren turned another page. He didn't say anything about what had just happened. He didn't have to.

Something shifted in my chest, quiet and specific. The realization that I didn't have to manage this alone. That I hadn't been, for a while now, without fully understanding it.

* * *

Thursday morning, I came out of Professor Chen's lecture into the gray November air and Garrett was there.

He fell into step beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like we were still the people we used to be, walking across campus together, and the restaurant had never happened.

'Hey.' His voice was warm. The warm version, the one I used to save up like currency. 'I've been trying to reach you.'

I kept walking.

'Lea.' He adjusted his pace to match mine. 'I know you're angry. You have every right to be. But Francesca — she took it further than I ever wanted. I didn't know she was going to do it like that, in public, I didn't—'

The path curved toward the library. I followed the curve.

'I miss you,' he said. 'I miss talking to you. I miss how things were.'

How things were. I turned that over in my mind as I walked. How things were: me waiting, me shrinking, me reading the same message seventeen times looking for proof that I mattered. How things were: him looking at the grill while Francesca took me apart piece by piece.

He was still talking. Something about how long we'd known each other, how that had to count for something, how he'd been doing a lot of thinking.

'I have a session,' I said.

I turned toward the library steps.

Behind me, I heard him stop. I didn't turn around. I went up the steps and through the door and into the warm paper-smell of the building, and I didn't look back.

But I knew what I'd see if I did. I'd seen it in the half-second before I turned: Garrett standing in the middle of the path, the warm version of his face gone, replaced by something I'd never seen on him before.

Uncertainty. Real uncertainty, not performed.

I filed it away and kept walking.

* * *

The library was quiet at that hour. We had our usual table, the one near the window with the afternoon light that came in at an angle and made everything look slightly warmer than it was.

We'd been working for maybe an hour when I asked it. I hadn't planned to. It just came out, careful and tentative, like I was testing whether the question was allowed.

'Why don't you ever seem rattled by anything?'

Soren looked up from his notes. He didn't answer right away. He set his pen down and looked at the window for a moment, at the flat white sky.

'There was a butterfly,' he said. 'A morpho. I was repairing it — the wing had a fracture along the discal cell, very fine, the kind you can only fix with the right adhesive and a lot of patience.' He paused. 'My family moved unexpectedly. I had to leave it mid-repair. I left it on a shelf at my uncle's house, still broken, and I thought about it for a long time afterward.'

I watched his face. There was something careful in it, something he was holding at a specific distance.

'What happened to it?' I asked.

'Someone repaired it.' He picked up his pen again. 'The right person, at the right time. Better than I would have, I think.' He looked at me. 'I learned that forcing the process ruins it. Some things need to wait for the right hands.'

I sat with that for a moment.

I'd spent ten years apologizing for how long things took me. For being a beat behind, for needing the question twice, for processing at my own unhurried pace while the world moved on without waiting.

Some things need to wait for the right hands.

I didn't say anything. I just opened my notebook and went back to work.

But I stopped apologizing. Not out loud — I hadn't been doing it out loud for a while. I stopped doing it in the quiet place inside myself where I kept the running tally of all the ways I was too slow, too much, not enough.

I just stopped.

Outside, the flat white sky held its breath. The afternoon light came through the window at its angle and made everything look slightly warmer than it was.

I wrote three pages without stopping once to doubt them.