“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 to be okay, but it also doesn’t mean you should use him as an excuse to shut yourself off from the world—from the people who love you. All we’ve ever done is be there for you and it’s not fair. You know it’s not fair.”