Page 57 of Come Back To Me

His lips pull into a straight line and he nods, an attempt at a smile.

“Why? Why did you go, Yara?”

“I didn’t imagine it going like this,” I say. My straw wrapper is mangled so I twist and untwist the napkin in my lap. My hands can never be still when I’m upset.

“How’d you think this was going to go down?” he asks.

One of his elbows is resting on the table. His posture is casual, flippant, like he doesn’t care to be here, but must. He’s running a thumb across his lips as he stares at me.

“You meet me here, we have a few drinks, we chat about where our lives are now, and then we hug as we part ways and say ‘let’s do this again sometime’?”

“I—I don’t know, David. I came because you asked me to and I thought I owed you that.”

“How long has it been since you left?”

Since you left.Not—since we last saw each other.He’s not wrong to say it that way, but the phrasing still hurts.

“Years…three years…”

“Three years, two months, five days,” he says.

I don’t respond. How can I? I feel like he’s trying to prove that he cares more.

“Beat me up,” I say. “Say anything you like if it makes you feel better.” I lean back against my seat. “I deserve it.”

“That’s not why I asked you here,” he says.

“Why did you?”

“I’m in love.”

I feel as if I’m in a snow globe and someone’s shaken me around. Of course he’s been loving other girls, fucking other girls—but to hear it.

“I want to marry her, but I can’t because I’m still married to you.”

Our wine arrives. Perfect and terrible timing. We’re locked in a cold stare while it’s opened and poured. David accepts his small taste and nods to the server, never taking his eyes off me. She, in turn, pours me a glass and discreetly disappears. He drains his glass and pours himself another. I wish for something stronger as I lick my lips.

“Who is she?”

He’s shaking his head already. “You don’t get to know that. You left.”

I feel a rise of anger that I’m probably not entitled to. But I came, I met him, and now I also want answers.

“I do get to know that, because you want me to sign papers. That’s why you’re here.”

He considers me for a moment and then says, “Tell me why you left, Yara.” Before I can answer or even process his words, he rephrases them. “Tell me why you left me.”

It’s more painful when he says it that way. It’s also the truth. I didn’t just leave Seattle, or the States, I left him—a person, the human I claimed to love.

I imagine the look on my face is awful because David almost looks sorry he asked.

I haven’t taken a deep breath since I saw him, so I do that first, then I say, “I always said I’d leave, remember? I knew you’d be better if I was gone.”

“Better at what?”

I shake my head. My hands are trembling. “Better. Just better.”

“A better man, a better human, or what was it…a better artist?”

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