At least we made personal progress. Liam isn’t as uptight as he used to be and I’m attempting to let go of some pent-up feelings. He talks more about his future and I reveal more about my past. We’re both just more relaxed in general.
It’s coming on the end of month two of my trip and I finally start telephoning everyone back home instead of emailing. I call my mom first and she’s thrilled to hear from me. Things have noticeably shifted between us since our open conversation at my apartment. She’s not on the offensive. I’m not on guard. We’re talking and enjoying each other in a way that feels brand-new, yet so familiar, and I hope it stays this way forever.
Cristina is next and she can barely contain her excitement when I call. She gives me even more details about her honeymoon in Turks and Caicos and explains how she’s taking home ovulation tests since she’s trying to get pregnant, like, yesterday. I didn’t know so many elements came into play when making a baby, but apparently you only have a twelve-to-forty-eight-hour window to make it happen, and hoisting your hips into the air like a fertility acrobat after doing the deed really helps your odds. I’ll have to ask Jen if she partook in these Cirque Du Soleil conception techniques.
Now it’s time for Maggie. I can’t wait to hear her voice and tell her everything that’s been going on. Excited energy ripples through me as I press the call button and wait for her to pick up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Maggie. It’s me!” Silence follows and I wonder if we got disconnected. “Maggie?”
“Oh, hey,” she says. “What’s up?”
Her words would be totally normal in other circumstances but right now, they feel jarring. She doesn’t sound happy to hear from me at all.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound...like yourself.”
“Really? How do I sound?”
My heart starts to race and I have the sudden intense urge to duck back inside my emotional bomb shelter. “You seem different, I guess—are you mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you?” she asks in a clipped tone.
My hand gets clammy and I wipe it along the side of my pants. “I don’t know. Do you want to tell me?”
“Sure. I actually would have loved to have told you a while ago, but this is the first time you’re calling me in two months.”
“I haven’t called anyone,” I offer weakly. “And you and I have been emailing.”
“I realize that, but we went from speaking almost every day for years to you not calling me for months. And yeah, you emailed me, but your emails might as well have been automated responses. You sound like a bot in every single one.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Maggie. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you felt this way.”
“You didn’t know I felt this way because you didn’t talk to me! I have a life, too, Kara. It’s not just you. I have things going on and I have problems and sometimes I really needed to talk to my best friend. It would have been awesome if she didn’t bail on me for months at a time.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, already knowing it’s not enough.
“My grandma fell down the stairs last month. She broke her hip and her wrist and she’s holed up in the hospital until further notice. They say the recovery time will be extensive, if she even recovers at all.”
Maggie’s email—the one where she asked me to call and I didn’t. My stomach is queasy and the back of my neck is burning. I give my ever-present guilt full permission to hollow out an even deeper hole in my chest.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
She doesn’t say anything. The line goes quiet until I hear her suck in a breath, and I can tell she’s getting emotional but is trying to hide it.
My gut clenches. I might cry. I want to say a million things but nothing comes out.
“Is this all because of Ryan?” she asks after a moment.
I squeeze the phone closer to my ear. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“It is, then. Do you realize that you emotionally checked out—that you, a grown woman, didn’t verbally communicate with your friends or family for months because of a bad breakup? Do you hear how crazy that sounds?”
I want to answer that I do hear how crazy it sounds. That the truth of how I dealt with things blared around me so often and so loud that all I could do was run from it. But it wasn’t just about Ryan. Yes, he played a big part in it, but I was also running from the stress of my deadline, from myself, from all my doubts and from life as a whole. I didn’t want to talk about my problems and so I chose not to talk at all. I hid and I pulled away from everyone—especially her. Probably because deep down I knew she’d be the first one to call me out on my cowardice.
“Look,” Maggie goes on, “Ryan had a fiancée and he didn’t tell you. That was such a crappy thing for him to do, but should it really be unforgivable when he was clearly in love with you?”
My eyes scrunch a bit at her almost-justification of Ryan’s actions.
“Obviously, it’s unforgivable. He was lying to me the whole time. He was cheating.”
“He wasn’t cheating on you. He was yours first and he was only engaged to that girl for fourteen days. It’s not like he was married with kids. He sounded heartbroken over hurting you, plus, he explained why he did what he did.”
“Explaining it doesn’t make it okay.”
“It doesn’t have
