“Why let me keep trying with someone you knew didn’t like me?”
He was quiet.
“Because she’s my mother.”
“That explains protecting her feelings.
It doesn’t explain sacrificing mine.”
“I thought if you spent more time together—”
“She told me I bother her.”
“She can be difficult.”
“She accepted a vacation I paid for while feeling that way.”
“I know.”
“And you knew.”
Another silence.
That silence had become his most honest language.
I asked him one final question.
“When you packed your suitcase that morning, did you ever think about what it would feel like for me to wake up and find both of you gone?”
He began with my name.
“Felicity—”
“No.
Did you?”
His answer came quietly.
“I thought you’d be angry.”
Not frightened.
Not humiliated.
Not devastated.
Angry.
As if my pain was just a reaction he had calculated and decided he could survive.
That was the moment I knew the problem was larger than Tiana.
The rest of Barcelona became mine.
I ate the meals I had booked.
I walked streets we had planned to walk together.
I took photographs without forcing a smile for anyone.
I sat on the balcony every morning with coffee.
I did not transform into a different person.
I did not suddenly feel grateful for betrayal.
Some nights I cried again.
But each day, the feeling of being discarded became smaller than the fact that I was still there.
When the original return date arrived, I packed my suitcase and went to the airport using the ticket I had planned to use all along.
Frank offered to pick me up when I landed.
I declined and took a car home.
His vehicle was in the driveway.
For a moment, I sat outside looking at the house I had bought years before I met him.
Then I went inside.
Frank was waiting in the living room.
He looked exhausted.
Tiana was not there.
“I told Mom not to come,” he said.
“Good.”
He stood when I entered.
“I’m sorry.”
I set my suitcase down.
“For leaving?”
“For all of it.”
“What does all of it mean?”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“Knowing how she felt.
Hoping you’d fix it.
