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Mia refilled my wine glass without being asked, which was why she was my person, my ride-or-die, the peanut butter to my very expired and questionable jelly. I took it, leaned back into the emerald velvet, and ate my weight in tacos while they generously kept me company. They were people who understood that sometimes you don't need to be fixed.

Sometimes, you just need wine and a velvet couch and someone to sit with you while you're not okay.

I got home around midnight.

My apartment was dark and quiet, the string lights off for once, and I sat on my couch in my going-out dress with my shoes still on and pulled out my phone. Apparently, I had learned zero lessons.

I opened Instagram.

Cam had posted. A game photo from Wednesday, the series clincher. Mid-drive, body fully extended, the ball leaving her fingertips at an angle that looked physically impossible until you remembered she did this for a living and physics bent differently for her. The comments were full of love and admiration and people using the word GOAT as a verb.

I looked at the photo for longer than was reasonable.

I put my phone face down on the couch.

I picked it back up.

I opened my camera roll instead and found the photo I'd taken before the date, the one where the bathroom lighting had been genuinely kind and I'd looked, if I was being honest, very good. The orange dress. The flawless makeup. My bare collarbone. The expression of someone who was going to try, damn it.

I posted it before I could think too hard about why.

Caption: New adventures.

I stared at it.

I understood immediately that it had been a mistake. Not the photo. The photo was great. But what I was doing was performing moving on for an audience of three thousand followers and one specific person who I knew followed me and who I was absolutely, definitely not posting this for.

I didn't delete it.

I was moving on. I was. If I had to drag myself forward by the hair, I was going to do it.

Five minutes later, my phone buzzed with a message from a number I didn't recognize.

That meant zilch, because I'd deleted the contact the week before specifically to remove the temptation of texting it at two in the morning.

I knew anyway. Before I even read it.

Unknown Number

I hope you're happy. You deserve all the happiness in the world.

I sat with the message for a long time.

She'd seen it. Within five minutes, at midnight, alone in that kitchen with one light on, she'd seen me in an orange dress going on a date with someone else, and she'd typed you deserve all the happiness in the world, and she'd meant it. I knew she'd meant it. That was the worst part. She wasn't trying to win me back. She was letting me go, again, as kindly as she knew how.

In another version of this, I might have answered. I might have said then come get me, or you know what you need to do, or, honestly, some version of please, Cam, please just be brave enough, because I'm so tired of missing you and it's only been two weeks and I don't know how I'm supposed to do this for longer.

Instead, I deleted it.

If Cam wanted to talk to me, she knew what she needed to do. A kind text at midnight while I sat on my couch in a going-out dress wasted on an evening spent thinking about her was not it.

I turned off my phone.

I changed out of the dress, washed off the makeup, tied on my bonnet, pulled the covers up, lay in the dark, and finally let myself have it. The whole wave. The grief I'd been holding at arm's length all evening behind wit and wine and good conversation with a perfectly nice woman I had not been able to want.

I missed Cam.

I missed her so much that it was almost absurd, given that we'd never been together in any official, lasting way. I missed the texts she used to send me at eleven PM explaining basketball plays with so much enthusiasm, like she genuinely couldn't believe I didn't already find this fascinating. I missed the way she'd argued with me in the early days, sharp and certain, completely convinced I was wrong, and the way I'd watched her conviction slowly complicate as she started paying closer attention. I missed her voice, the low register of it, the way it changed when she was being honest instead of careful.