Page 76 of Crosswind

What I feel is… something else. Something I don't have the exact word for yet.

Lars is watching me with the expression of an old friend who has noticed something.

"You okay?" he says. Quietly.

"Yeah," I say. "I didn't know she'd be here."

"I didn't either." He pauses. "She looks good."

"She does."

"He's a good guy," Lars says. "She's been seeing him a few weeks. She seems…” He pauses again. "Happy."

I look at my plate. I think about Maya in the photograph on my parents' wall — the Christmas three years ago, all of us at the table, her laughing at something my father said. I think about the person she was in that photograph, the person I was, the version of the future I understood then.

"Good," I say. "That's good."

And I mean it. That's the strange part, I mean it entirely. Maya deserves to be happy. Maya, who ended things with grace and who texted me the night before I posted the video and said go be happy, that's all I want, Maya finding happiness is not a complicated thing. It is a simple and correct thing.

And yet.

I sit with the contradiction for a moment. Allow it the space it apparently requires.

I think: this is what the end of something looks like. Not the conversation, not the returned keys, not even the months after. This. A restaurant in September, her coat and her new person and her genuine smile from across the room. The past being simply the past — complete, finished, no longer requiring anything from either of us.

I spent three years with her. I thought I knew what my life was going to look like. I was wrong, but I didn't know I was wrong, which means there was a version of me in that Christmas photograph who was doing his best with what he understood and didn't know yet what he was missing.

I don't miss what he understood. I miss him a little. The uncomplicated version of things, the future that made sense from the outside.

But then I think about Jan. I think about the third drawer and the jacket on the hook and the big spoon arrangement that doesn't quite work geometrically and doesn't need to. I think about the truth I see in Jan every time he comes through the door: wherever I am is home to him. He has never said it, but I see it. I think about the wall that came down in the hallway on a Thursday evening and what it took and what it gave.

I wouldn't go back.

Not for the uncomplicated version. Not for any version.

"She does look happy," I say to Lars. "I'm glad."

Lars puts his hand on my shoulder briefly. Says nothing. We go back to our dinner.

Jan texts from Madrid at twenty-two-forty.

How was simulator.

I type back: Good. Had dinner with Lars and some people. Good evening.

I look at the message. The Amsterdam night outside, quiet and dark.

I think about Jan in the hallway a few weeks ago, standing behind the closed bedroom door with the fear he had been carrying alone for weeks. The cost of not saying it. How long he held it before it broke. What it took.

I think about the thing we have never named directly but which exists — the unspoken agreement of two people who have both learned, at some cost, what happens when you manage things alone instead of saying them. We have not put it in words. We don't need to.

I call him.

He answers on the second ring. "Patrick." Slightly alert, the Jan tone of someone who has registered that a call is different from a text. "What happened."

"Nothing bad," I say. "I just… I need to tell you something and I didn't want to text it."

A pause. "Okay."