Later — a while later — a message.

Then a conversation, the way it used to be, at the speed it used to be, and it was frighteningly easy to fall back into that speed.

And then an invitation. Come over.

the version of me that would have gone

He existed. He was not hypothetical. He was about eighteen months old at that point and he would have been in the car in four minutes.

I knew what that road was. Not because anything was going to be catastrophic, but because I had already been down it and I had written a whole chapter about what I learned there, and it would have been a genuinely stupid use of a lesson to have paid for it and then not use it.

So I said no.

Not humility. Accuracy. That refusal was not virtue arriving in the moment. It was chapter eight showing up on time. I had done the work months earlier, in a much less dramatic room, and this was just the withdrawal.

so we called instead

And we talked. For hours, about everything, in the register we had not been allowed to use in eleven weeks of being polite in a classroom.

At some point it got late enough to be early. She was falling asleep. And she mentioned that she still had psalms left to read.

I had my Bible on the desk.

So I started at ninety-five.

what that was

Three hours. Ninety-five to a hundred and fifty-one. Her mostly asleep on the other end of the line. Me reading, quietly, in the dark, to someone I was not supposed to be talking to at four in the morning.

I am not going to reproduce the text here — it isn't mine to hand out at length, and anyway the words are not the point. Any of a hundred translations will give you the words.

The point is the act. The point is that after everything — after the separation and the silence and the eleven weeks of being pleasant — this was what we found to do with the time.

Not a fight. Not a reconciliation. Not the other thing.

Reading.

She woke up somewhere around a hundred and forty. And in the last light before that call ended, we both said the thing we had been very carefully not saying.

Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.