Neither of us spoke for a moment.
Then I asked the question that had been waiting between us since the call began.
“Why didn’t you come?”
Silence. Longer this time. Confused silence. Not guilty silence.
Confused.
When Jack finally spoke, his voice had changed completely. “What?”
“The café.” I stared out the window. “Twenty years ago.”
Still silence. Then, “Audrey…”
A strange feeling began creeping into my stomach. The kind that arrives before bad news. Or important news.
“I was there.”
Everything inside me stopped. “What?”
“I was there.”
I laughed. A short, disbelieving sound. “No.”
“I was.”
“Jack, I sat there for three hours.”
“So did I.”
“What day?”
Silence. Then, “Saturday, June 12.”
My stomach dropped. “Jack…”
Another pause. Then I heard it happen. The exact moment he realized it.
“No.”
I closed my eyes, because my date had been June fifth.
We hadn’t gone to different places.
We’d gone on different Saturdays. During our last conversation, we’d changed the date twice. Somehow, each of us had walked away remembering a different one.
For 20 years, I believed Jack chose not to come. For 20 years, Jack believed the same thing about me.
Neither of us spoke, because suddenly, the world wasn’t making sense anymore.
I sank into a chair. My heart was hammering. “This is ridiculous.”
Jack laughed.
The sound wasn’t happy. It was stunned. “I know.”
“We lost 20 years because of a misunderstanding?”
“Looks that way.”
I covered my face with one hand. Part of me wanted to laugh, part of me wanted to scream, and part of me suddenly understood why he’d kept the photographs.
Because the story he’d been carrying was the same one I’d been carrying. Just from the opposite side. Neither of us had gotten an ending. Neither of us had gotten an answer.
We’d only gotten silence.
When I finally lowered my hand, I realized something. The anger I’d carried for two decades was gone. Not because the past had changed, but because it finally made sense.
Jack spoke quietly. “You know what’s funny?”
