I searched her face, trying to figure out if those tears were hers, or echoes of mine, but she was too focused, too committed to her role to reveal her internal world to me. She wasn’t there to give, only to take, to hold, and to release. I felt warmth in her neutrality though. Not the rejection I had expected and deserved, but tenderness, and the wide-open heart I’d always known her to have.

I leaned forward and tried to peer deeper into her. She and I have uncannily similar eyes. The same gray circles around the same redwood-brown irises. Maybe that was part of our connection, I thought. We saw ourselves in each other. Two sides of the same moon. The light and the dark.

I watched her take me in and wondered how I looked to her. I was in gray cords and a green flannel over an old T-shirt. I wished I’d dressed better and gotten a haircut. My nose was running from the crying and I wanted to wipe it on my sleeve, but no way was I going to let go of her hands.

For weeks I’d been imagining what I was going to say, entertaining the inane notion that I would be able to speed-explain the last three years of my life: where I’d been, what I’d been doing, why I’d come back. There was no place for that. The space felt too sacred to be filled up with banal specifics. I wanted to be poetic, not prosaic. Though what I ended up expressing was mostly just a series of apologetic tangents.

“I guess I should start by stating the obvious. I fucked up, and I’m sorry.” I thought of Cal, of what a looming presence he was in my life, of how his ability to forgive me gave me strength, and I got choked up again. “Fucking up is what I do. Or, what I did. Past tense.” October was listening with so much concentration and attention it stunned me and made me tremble. “I’ve spent a lot of my life taking the wrong turns off the right roads. I feel it when it’s happening, and I regret it every time it does.” I desperately needed to wipe my nose, but all I could do was sniffle. “There’s no excuse for what I did to you. I know that. I’m not here to make excuses. I’m here to acknowledge what a coward I was. I’m here to say I’m sorry. If I had more than five minutes, I’d say it a thousand times.” I ran my thumbs over her knuckles, caressed the tops of her hands. “I hope you can find it in your heart to hear these words and accept them as my truth and my sorrow. If I’ve learned anything in the last three years—and I have, I swear—it’s that I’ll never be any greater than the sum of my missed opportunities unless I stop missing them.” I shook my head, struggled to express exactly what I was feeling, and then collapsed into it. “Fuck, October. I tried so hard to let you go. All this time I tried to stop loving you. But it just dawned on me that I don’t want to stop loving you. I just want to stop missing you.” My affection for her overwhelmed me, and it was all I could do not to dive across the table and pull her into my arms. “Every day I think about what I did to you. I live with that every day. I miss you every day. And the worst part? You were my friend, first and foremost, and I hurt you.”