Well, maybe not demand, maybe just ask nicely. Just for a ballpark number, you know? So Ididn’t have to stress so much.
Patience was never really my strong suit anyway, which is why I wasn’t surprised to find myself walking up the front steps of Harper’s townhome after the third night of silence in a row.
I knocked.
Then I thought better of it and rang the bell. I wanted to make sure he heard me.
No answer.
No answer to the phone, or his texts, and now to the door. For the last two weeks we had been making steps toward being okay. But now, suddenly no answer meant no hope. No answer meant no way forward. No answer meant no Harper, and I did not sign up for thisnotto have him at the end.
Fuck no.
“The caller you have dialed has a voice mailbox that is currently full.”
“Fuck.”
I mean darn!
Geez, I was cursing a lot these days. But my nerves were entirely fried.
“Harper,” I called hesitantly to the door. It was after work hours, after dinner hours, and I’d already checked his other usual locales. He couldn’t be anywhere else but home. And the prospect that he was here and he could hear me and just wasn’t answering fried my nerves. I knocked harder. “Harper!”
Nothing.
Long painful silence from the other side of the door was like an answer to a question I’d refused to ask. I refused to give Harper the chance to even imply that we could be done that night when he was upset and hurting, and I thought after these past weeks of space that was the right thing to do. To be there for him no matter what.
But he wasn’t answering. And after a while I realized thatwashis answer. He was done.Wewere, and that was it.
I didn’t want to accept it as I stood at the door in the dead cold.But the difference between me standing here now and me knocking on his door that first time I visited was palpable.
He wanted me then, and he wanted nothing to do with me now.
Heavy, sluggish, defeated, I turned away from the door and carefully picked my way down the front steps. The light cascaded over the front walk as it flicked on and the sound of the front door opening brought my head whipping around to meet him with excitement spilling out of my chest.
That excitement died on arrival. It wasn’t Harper at the door—or rather, it wasaHarper. Alexandra Harper to be precise. She was opening her son’s large wooden front door dressed in a long robe, her shoulder length hair fluffy around her face. Her eyes looked sleepy as she squinted at me through the darkness. “Hello?”
“Um,” I looked around myself, but eventually took a step back toward the door. “Hello.”
“Oh,” she said, seeming to find some recognition in just the few words I’d spoken. “Oh, it’s you! Come in, come in. It’s freezing out here.”
I bit my lip. “I’m okay here, just—is Harper home?”
“Harper,” there was a smile in her voice and I found myself nearing further to see it. It was pretty, like her. And when I neared enough to make out her facial features, I realized that I knew that soft smile. Because it was his. “You call him Harper?”
“I do, yeah,” I said awkwardly.
“Why?”
I wrinkled my nose. “He goes by Gus here.”
She wrinkled her nose too, her head shaking and her smile pulling into a grin. “That boy.”
I peeked an eye over her. She was a far cry from storming out of the shop in tears like that first time. She seemed more herself, like the way she’d been in my brother’s office. Calmer, more composed, more in charge of the situation. But in a soft way.
I knew Harper had complicated feelings about his family, butshe seemed so pleasant right there. And suddenly I was curious. “What do you call him?”
She smiled and her cheek sank against her hand on the door. “Auggie. He once told me that his sister and I were the only people he’d ever let call him that. I guess he meant it.”
