She said he’d sat in that car for almost two hours in 2019, watching the house and trying to decide whether he could knock on the door. He had the photograph of me on the refrigerator because he’d taken it from one of the Sunday calls and kept it there, and he had apparently been carrying my address in his wallet for years. But when he finally got out of the car, he stood at the end of the driveway and remembered something I’d said to him during the worst argument we’d ever had. She couldn’t remember the exact words, but she said he had repeated them to her more than once. I told him that if he ever walked away from me again, he shouldn’t come back expecting me to open the door.
She said that was why he never knocked. He had taken me literally. He thought he’d already broken the promise I’d made him when he was a boy, and he was afraid that coming back would only prove that I meant what I’d said. Then she told me something that made me realize those eleven-minute calls every Sunday had never been casual at all. He had been sitting in his car before almost every call, sometimes for an hour, because he wanted to hear my voice before he went inside his apartment. He knew exactly when my knee hurt, which stories I’d tell twice, and what I sounded like when I was pretending everything was fine. He had been planning to come home for seven years.
Then she opened a drawer and showed me the thing he’d left there for me. It was a birthday card he’d bought in 2019, still sealed, with my name written on the front in his handwriting. Inside was one sentence: “I didn’t leave because I stopped loving you. I left because I thought you wanted me gone.” Underneath it was a date, and that date was the same Sunday as one of the four hundred calls I had kept track of. I asked her why he never told me any of this, and she started crying. She said he had finally decided to come home this spring, but he wanted to do it in person, because he said there was one thing he needed to ask me before he came through that door — and that question was…
