Page 106 of Knot Her Beta

The second attempt is simpler.

I panicked.

True.

I needed air.

True.

I should have told you before I left.

Also true.

I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t explain it because I was overwhelmed and panicking and didn’t want to mess things up.

The next sentence flows without pause.

Then I panicked some more because Leif and Jared knew what to do without hesitating, and I didn’t understand. They fit in the moment, when I so clearly did not.

I pause and consider crossing it all out. The words come across as though I’m blaming them for my ignorance instead of explaining myself. It sounds jealous, though I wasn’t jealous. The emotion I felt was closer to grief. A feeling when you see people who are designed for each other, and you understand, at the basest level, you will never be that for her, and you are not sure if it matters, and you are terrified because it does.

Ignorance has never sat well with me, and I assumed I understood, in theory at least, what was going to happen. And I had been right, at the beginning. But not right at all when the moment mattered.

More time should have gone into researching the physiological differences between our secondary genders. More questions should have been asked, though the right ones didn’t occur to me until the moment arrived.

I backtrack to before the Rut, writing about how much our Saturday dinners have come to mean to me, how much I enjoy when she pops over in the middle of the day with lunch, and how I hate my disability but love how she fusses over me without ever treating me as if my injury turned me into less of a person.

I flip to the second page. The light through the window has deepened from gray to black, and the stars between the pines have brightened. I write about how much it had meant to me for Leif to meet me at the airport, when my own family hadn’t even bothered to send a car.

Then I describe standing in this cabin for the first time, knowing Emily had a hand in building me a home without ever demanding more of me or trying to attach strings to the gift.

On the fourth page, my hand starts to ache where my fingers have tightened around the pen without my noticing. I pause to read back the last line I wrote.

I’m not sure how to explain how much leaving hurt, but staying would have hurt more.

I have not apologized once. I realize this sitting in the quiet of the cedar-scented office with my bad knee propped on a footstool Emily built for this purpose and four pages of handwriting spread across the desk she made for me to work at.

I haven’t apologized once, and the letter is four pages long, and I’m not finished.

The pad of paper runs out sometime in the middle of the next morning. I don’t notice until the pen scrapes across the cardboard backing and catches. Mild surprise ripples through me, the same way an empty coffee cup catches you off guard when you go for another sip.

I find the single ream of printer paper in the closet, still in its plastic wrapping, and I tear it open and carry the stack to the desk and keep going.

My phone buzzes from the sofa, but it’s out of reach, and I need to get these thoughts out. It lights up in my peripheral vision, the screen going bright, dark, and bright again.

I write about the first Saturday dinner at Emily’s cottage. The way the rosemary hit me before I stepped through the door, layered over the warm, yeasty scent of fresh bread. The way she stood at the stove with her back to us, her feet planted, a wooden spoon in one hand, and she welcomed me with a warm smile, as if we’d been doing this for years.

Next comes the evening Jared and I shared drinks on the back patio, the summer garden blooming around us. I felt so at ease I never wanted to leave.

As the light through the window turns a flat white, I flip to a new page.

Leif follows. Saturday Markets. Shared conversations. The ease of it all. Then the confusion and hurt when it suddenly ended.

I admit to allowing him to pull back, to not trying harder to find out why, to accepting the silence and my regret. And how easily it was all fixed with simple apologies in an airport elevator.

Finally, I turn to my family, both before university and during my most recent trip to Connecticut. I write about the expectations, the disregard, and Caroline, trapped beneath the weight of her own family’s expectations. I write about the guilt over how I could have saved her, but didn’t, because the cost was too high.

I forget to eat until my stomach cramps in demand and sends me into the kitchen to find crackers in the cabinet and a jar of peanut butter someone pre-stocked alongside some apples and two containers of yogurt. I eat at the counter without sitting down, not tasting any of it, already turning the next sentence over in my head.