“I’m allowed to have a cup,” she shot back as I brushed past her. I smirked and walked toward my cube. I could feel her walking behind me, her ballet flats shuffling against the carpet, kicking up electrical currents. She had a habit of dragging her feet.
I flipped on my computer and turned to see her standing behind me, waiting to acknowledge her. Her hair was sticking up, floating off her shoulders from the static electricity. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What?”
“Your hair.” I pointed, like a five-year-old.
She scowled and wrapped her hair in a bun, grabbing a pencil off my desk to hold it in place.
“Thanks for getting a drink with Brad and picking up the tote last night.”
“Thanks for organizing my personal shit for me. Did you toss anything from the original box?”
“No, I could barely look inside of it. It was like a shrine to Grace.”
“Why were you so determined that I get all that stuff back, then?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel bad, I guess.”
“What exactly do you feel bad about?” I leaned back in my chair.
“Just . . . you know. How . . . I don’t know.”
“Tell me,” I urged with a smug grin. I couldn’t help but take pleasure as she struggled for words. She was clearly still envious of Grace.
“Just the way you put her on a pedestal and talked about her, like she was the one who got away.”
I leaned forward. “You’re not telling me everything—you’re doing that weird eyebrow thing that you do whenever you lie.”
“What weird eyebrow thing?”
“You wiggle one eyebrow, all crazylike. I don’t know how you do it. It’s like a creepy twitch.”
She self-consciously raised a hand to her brow. “It’s nothing that you don’t already know. I mean, we were so busy back then.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elizabeth’s eyes darted all over the room, like she was mapping out her exit strategy. She looked down at her overpriced shoes. “Grace called and left a message for you once, and . . . it was just . . .”
I stood. “What are you saying, Elizabeth?” I didn’t realize I was shouting until the room went completely silent. I could feel our colleagues peering around the walls of their cubicles at us.
“Shhh, Matt!” She leaned in. “Let me explain. It was while we were in South Africa.” She crossed her arms and lowered her voice. “You and I were already fucking. I didn’t know why she was calling.”
My mind raced to figure out the timeline. It would have been roughly two years after Grace and I last saw each other. After she disappeared.
“What did she say?” I asked, slowly.
“I don’t remember. It was so long ago. She was in Europe or something. She wanted to talk to you and see how you were doing. She left her address.”
Every nerve was on full alert. “What did you do, Elizabeth?”
“Nothing.”
She was acting so weird. Shifty. Like she still wasn’t telling me the whole truth.
“Just tell me what you did.”
She winced. “I wrote her a letter.”
“You didn’t . . .”
“I was in love with you, Matt. I wrote to her, but I was kind. I said that you had moved on, that she was part of your past, but that I wished her the best.”
My eyes were burning with fury. “What else did you do? For the love of God, Elizabeth, I’m about to make a headline, and I’m not a violent man. You know that.”
She started crying. “I was in love with you,” she repeated.
I was stunned. I always thought Grace ran off. She hadn’t left me so much as a note—no address, no phone number. I had been devastated, always believing that she had been the one who left me.
“If you were in love with me, why didn’t you give me the choice?”
Brad walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “What’s going on? What are you saying to her? She’s pregnant, man; what’s wrong with you?”
My chest was heaving. “Leave. Both of you.”
Elizabeth turned into Brad’s arms and started to cry against his chest. Brad glared at me and led her away, shaking his head, like I was the one who had done something awful.
Ever since I’d seen Grace on the subway, I’d been replaying everything that happened to us fifteen years ago, how the last conversation we’d had seemed so typical, just six week before I was supposed to fly home, back into her arms, back into the routine we’d set for ourselves during that year of heaven.
After work, I picked up the roll of film I had dropped off earlier. It was a Friday, and I had nothing better to do than go to my mostly empty loft and digest the news that Grace had tried to get in touch with me years ago. I sat on the couch near the big floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street.
Next to me, on the end table, was one small lamp; in my lap, the developed photos. The first three were blurry, but the fourth caught me off guard. It was a picture of me and Grace in our pajamas, standing in front of the blurry traffic lines. Our faces were slightly out of focus, but I could see that we were looking right at each other. That night we went to that diner in Brooklyn.
Every other photo was of Grace: in the lounge, in the park, sleeping in my bed, dancing in my dorm. All of her, captured in color.
I laid out each photo on my coffee table and stared at them as I thought back, reliving all the memories with her. Did I tell her I loved her? Did I know I loved her? What happened?