“You came to my house?” I asked.
“Three days before Christmas,” he said, naming the exact date.
“My dad answered the door?”
“Yes.” He told me he had rehearsed what he wanted to say during the entire drive. He didn’t have a grand speech; he simply wanted to ask if we had ended things because our relationship was genuinely flawed or merely because it was hard. But my father never invited him inside.
“He told me you weren’t home,” he recalled. “Then he told me I needed to leave you alone. He said you had met someone else at school.”
“No,” I interrupted. “There was no one else back then.”
My father had told him I was finally thriving, that I had stopped talking about transferring schools, and that I was seeing someone new. Most importantly, he stressed that I didn’t need my ex-boyfriend pulling me backward—and claimed I had asked him to pass that message along.
“I never asked him to say any of that,” I said, letting out a sharp, humorless laugh.
I began pressing him for details to confirm the memory. Was my mother’s car in the driveway? Yes. Was the porch light broken? Yes. Was my father wearing an old gray college sweatshirt?
He stared at me, astonished. “Yes.”
“I wasn’t seeing another guy,” I told him softly. “I was working holiday shifts at the bookstore. I was working until nine that night.”
He brought both hands up to cover his face. I had spent that entire break wondering if he would call, stubbornly refusing to reach out myself because I had initiated the breakup and felt it was unfair to drag him back. Every time the phone rang, I had listened closely; every time a car slowed down outside, I had peered through the window.
“I thought you simply didn’t fight for me,” I said.
“And I thought you didn’t want me to,” he replied.
