Static on the Line

The messages were seventeen. Not seventeen passionate declarations, not seventeen elaborate love letters. Seventeen messages that read like a checklist of minimal emotional investment:

u up? miss u she doesn't know can't wait til tuesday u look great in that photo

Priya read them on Jake's phone while he was in the shower, telling herself she was only borrowing it to call her dentist. The dentist did not need to be called. But the phone was in her hand, and the messages were there, and they were from someone named S. who clearly had a very specific and very unimpressed opinion of Jake Morrison, real estate agent, fiancé of Maya Ortiz, and, as Priya now understood, a man who believed that fidelity was something you did when it was convenient.

She showed Maya the phone in Maya's apartment, a cramped fourth-floor walk-up in Bushwick with a kitchen that smelled permanently of garlic and a bedroom where Maya's film scripts were stacked in towers on every surface.

Maya read the messages. She read them twice. Then she put the phone down on the counter, walked to the bedroom, and began packing a suitcase.

"Maya," Priya said. "What are you doing?"

"Booking a flight to Paris. The film shoot. I was thinking about it for months. Seems like the right time to stop thinking and start doing."

"Maya, what about Jake—"

"Jake is in the shower. He'll be out in twelve minutes. When he comes out, he'll find his ring on the kitchen counter and a note that says I'm not interested. Then he'll call me. I'll let it go to voicemail. Eventually he'll stop calling."

"Eventually?"

"Eventually," Maya said, zipping the suitcase. "Everyone stops doing things eventually, Priya. Jake's just going to have to learn that I can stop caring about him the same way."

Priya watched her pack. She had known Maya for four years. She had seen her cry over boys she should have laughed off and laugh over situations she should have cried about. She had learned, over four years, that Maya Ortiz was not a person who knew how to grieve. She was a person who knew how to move forward, and sometimes that looked like courage and sometimes it looked like cowardice and sometimes it looked like exactly what it was: a strategy for not feeling anything at all.

Maya was right about the flight, though. The shoot in Paris was real, and it was a small role—a woman sitting at a café table, saying two lines of dialogue, existing beautifully in the background while someone else's story took center stage. But it was Paris. And Maya had been waiting for the right moment to go.

The right moment, it turned out, was the moment a man named Jake Morrison proved that he was not worth waiting for.

Author Note & Copyright: