Not the bad parts, he'd thought about those enough. He thought about the very specific feeling of waking up every morning next to a person and understanding somewhere beneath consciousness that you were alone. That the presence of another body in the room didn't mean the presence of another person who actually saw you. He thought about how long he had lived with that feeling before he'd even been able to name it.
He thought about the fact that with Sophie, even on the other side of a fence, even through a screen door, even while he was lying on her kitchen floor with a flashlight in his teeth, he had never once felt alone. He fell asleep somewhere around 2:00 in the morning. When he woke up, it was to his alarm at 6:00 and Lily was already awake. He could hear her moving around in her room.
Could hear the particular sound of her talking to her stuffed animals with the seriousness of someone conducting important morning meetings. He made breakfast. He made Lily's lunch. He walked her to the bus stop.
He came back to the house. He stood in the backyard with his coffee. Sophie was not at the fence. For the first time in 8 months, the space where she usually stood was just a fence.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he went inside and went to work. She didn't text. He didn't either.
Two days went by with a silence between them that was completely different from the comfortable silence of their mornings. This one had a shape to it. A weight. It was the silence of two people who had each said something real and were now waiting to see what the other one was going to do with it.
On the third day, he ran into her in the driveway. She was getting groceries out of her car. He was coming back from a job site. They were both carrying things and the encounter had the particular awkward quality of a collision that neither person had time to prepare for.
"Hey," Caleb said. "Hey," Sophie said. A grocery bag swung gently from her hand. "How's the door?" he said.
Something moved across her face. The briefest flash of something that might have been amusement or might have been pain. He couldn't tell which because it was gone as quickly as it appeared. "Perfect," she said.
"It's been perfect. You did a good job." "Good." "Good." She shifted the grocery bag to her other hand. "I want to say something," she said. "Okay.
I don't want things to be strange." She met his eyes directly with the steadiness he'd come to think of as one of her defining qualities. Sophie didn't look away from things, even things that were uncomfortable. "What I said the other night, I meant it and I'm not going to take it back, but I also don't need you to do anything with it. I'm an adult.
I know you didn't ask for that." "Sophie." "I just don't want to lose the mornings," she said. And her voice, which had been careful and measured, slipped just slightly at the end of that sentence. Not dramatically, just enough. "The coffee and the fence and the nothing conversations.
I don't want to lose those. So, if you can, if it's not too strange, I'd rather we just go back to that." He looked at her, standing in her driveway with groceries in her arms and her chin slightly lifted, the way it always was when she was determined to manage something at a cost she wasn't showing. "I can't go back to that," he said. Her expression shifted.
"Caleb, I can't go back to it because going back means pretending I don't know what I know now." He set his toolbox down on the driveway. "And I'm not willing to do that." "What do you know now?" He had thought about this. He had thought about it for two days and two nights and through four job sites and one very long drive on the interstate where he'd had nothing but road and his own head and the radio station that kept playing songs that felt unbearably relevant to a man in his particular situation. "I know that I've been showing up at your house for eight months," he said.
"And every single time you made it feel like the most natural thing in the world for me to be there. And I know that nobody has done that for me in a very long time." Sophie was quiet. "That's a low bar, Caleb." "I know," he said. "I'm working on raising it." She almost smiled.
Almost. "I'm scared," he said. And it cost him something to say it that simply without dressing it up in practicality or deflecting it into a joke. I'm not going to pretend I'm not.
I built something with someone once and watched it fall apart. And I know what that does to a person. I know what it does to me specifically. I know how long it took me to feel like myself again." "I know," Sophie said softly.
"I'm not asking you to." "I'm not finished," he said. She stopped. "I'm scared," he said again. "And I also I also spent two days thinking about what it would mean to go back to just being your neighbor.
And I couldn't. I kept trying to imagine it and every version of it felt like choosing to be less than what I actually wanted." The driveway was quiet. A car went by on the street. "What do you actually want?" Sophie asked.
He looked at her. "I want to know if you'd want to have dinner with me," he said. "A real one. Not because your faucet is leaking.