Page 59 of Empty Net
The point is that he never stopped moving.
The point is that I have spent months being watched by a man who knows how to watch because he once wanted to be watched for different reasons and was not.
The point is that I see him too.
I do not text.
Not yet.
Telling is not safe tonight. Not because Caleb is unsafe. Because I am. Because I do not know how to say I watched you without making it sound like surveillance instead of recognition. Because the words are too new and my mouth is still learning to hold his name without treating it like a live wire.
I turn off the kitchen light.
In bed, the other pillow is undisturbed.
I think about Caleb at twenty, taking the risky pass because the lane existed.
I think about Isaac at twenty-one, asking how to know when to go.
I think about myself at thirty-five, still waiting for certainty before moving in half the places that matter.
You don't, I told Isaac. You just get better at being wrong.
In the dark, the sentence has the nerve to come back to me.
I close my eyes.
I do not know when I will tell Caleb I watched.
But I know I will.
That is new.
CALEB
There is a draft email in my work account titled Personal Relationship Disclosure.
This is not romantic.
This is also not accidental.
I wrote the subject line at 6:12 PM, stared at it for eleven minutes, and then closed the window without typing anything in the body because there are some things even I cannot turn into a document before the other person has agreed they exist.
Davis knocked on my open door at 6:24 with a folder in one hand and the expression of a man who had decided not to ask the question he came in wanting to ask.
"You going home tonight?" he said.
"Eventually."
"That is not a time."
"Neither is tonight."
He set the folder on my desk. "Alderman wants the Detroit travel adjustment by morning. Also, Dani said if you send one more clip request after ten, she's changing your console shortcuts to French."
"She wouldn't."
"She absolutely would."
