Chapter 6: Why She Left

The diner was called Mae's and it was everything a Nebraska diner should be — vinyl booths, a pie case that required commitment, a waitress named either Mae or someone who had fully become Mae through proximity. They ordered. Coffee and cherry pie for Jess, coffee and apple for Danny, which was such an him order that she felt it like a small bruise. She had spent five years forgetting small things like that, and being around him was making her remember them faster than she'd expected. "Can I ask you something?" he said, when their orders had arrived and she'd had a chance to fortify herself with pie. "Probably." "Did I do something? Five years ago. Or was it — " He stopped. Tried again. "I've been through every version of what happened and I can never find the one that makes sense." Jess looked at her pie. The truthful answer was complicated in the way that the most important answers always are — not because it required many words, but because the words required something of the speaker. She had been carrying this for five years, and here, in Nebraska, in a diner called Mae's, with ninety minutes to fill and nowhere to go, she found she was more tired of carrying it than afraid of setting it down. "You didn't do anything," she said. "That was the problem." He waited. "That night at Cara's party. You were going to say something. I could see it. You'd been working up to it all night, and I saw it coming, and I—" She stopped. "I panicked. And then I left early and didn't call and kept not calling until not calling was just what we were doing." Danny was very still. "What were you afraid I was going to say?" he asked carefully. "Something that would change everything." "Everything as in—" "Everything as in us. What we were." She met his eyes, which was harder than she'd thought it would be. "I didn't know if I wanted it to change. I didn't know how to figure that out without losing you either way. And I made the wrong call." The silence that followed was long and strange and full of the specific texture of things that have been said after a long time of not being said. "For what it's worth," Danny said finally, very quietly, "I was going to say exactly that." Jess exhaled. "What do we do with that?" she asked. "I honestly have no idea." He looked at his pie. "But I think seven more states is probably enough time to figure it out." Something loosened in her chest. Not resolved — just shifted, the bone moving back toward the socket. Still tender. But moving in the right direction.