He has been looking forward to it all day.
That is the thing he will come back to, afterwards, in the park and on his balcony and in the sleepless travels of the night: the looking forward. The way the day had organised itself around 7 p.m. the way days do when there is something to move towards. He had gone for a walk along the coast in the afternoon, had bought fish for dinner, had showered and changed with the particular ease of someone who knows they are about to see a person they love, even if seeing means on a screen.
He had been happy. That was the word. He had been, for the first time in longer than he could accurately measure, simply and uncomplicatedly happy.
He opens his laptop at the kitchen table at seven o'clock, Melbourne time, and clicks on Messenger.
He sees it immediately. Where her name should be, where her photograph should be... the Brighton photo, 2019, the one she'd described as me looking younger and significantly less complicated... there is a grey icon. A generic silhouette. The name beneath it reads: Facebook User.
He stares at it.
The air in his house suddenly has no oxygen in it.
He closes the browser.
He opens it again.
Facebook User. The cold absence where she used to be.
He clicks on the chat in total panic. It is all still there. He can see that with a relief that lasts perhaps four seconds before he understands what it means. Their conversation, the whole of it, scrolling back through days, through the things they'd said and the way they'd said them. He can see her words but cannot reach her. He tries to type into the message box and nothing happens. The field is inert.
He reaches for his phone. His hands are not entirely steady. He experiences the terrifying drowsiness of a man who has just lost his only anchor.
On his phone, the same. Facebook User. The grey icon. He goes to the search bar and types her name — Lizzie Hartwell — and waits, and nothing comes back. He tries variations, abbreviations, anything, and the search returns a lot of Lizzie Hartwells but none of them are her. It is not a technical error. To his horror, he realises that this can mean only one thing.
Instagram. He opens it and searches and she is not there either.
He puts the phone down on the table.
He picks it up again.
He sits at the kitchen table, shivering, with his shower-damp hair and his very specific understanding of what has happened, and he thinks: Don.
He doesn't know this for certain. This is what he tells himself anyway. Perhaps there is another explanation... she changed her mind about him, she panicked again, she decided on her own...
But wouldn't she have had the decency to tell him in that case? Lizzie's too honest. She cares too much about his feelings. She cares about everyone else instead of herself.
The blocking is also too complete, too carefully executed across every platform simultaneously. That is not a panicked decision made alone. That has the smell of something done while being watched.
What did I do? is his first thought, the helpless, searching thought.
What has happened to her? is his second, which is worse.
He goes to the balcony.
He lives... he has not told her where exactly, some instinct of caution about week-old online relationships. Perhaps he didn't want to seem like the kind of man who boasts about his balcony on the peninsula, east of Melbourne, where the bay opens into the Bass Strait and the land runs out in a series of cliffs and rock shelves and wind-bent coastal scrub. To the west, Melbourne sits in the evening light, the city low on the horizon, its towers just distinguishable, lit amber by the late sun. To the east, the Liptrap lighthouse will begin its work in another hour, casting its patient beam across the water.
He stands at the railing and looks at the ocean and breathes.
The waves come in against the rocks below with the sound they always make, that percussive, low, continuous rumble that he has lived alongside for four years and usually registers as background, as comforting, as the ambient music of this particular life. Tonight it is way too loud. It's thundering inside his chest, that same rhythm, that same insistence, and he grips the railing and he breathes and he thinks about her.
He thinks about the first message. Hi. One word, and the particular feeling of it... the hesitance, the bravery, the person who almost didn't stay. He thinks about the hours that followed, the way the conversation had moved from cautious to open to sexual with a naturalness he had never experienced before, as though they had both been waiting, without knowing what they were waiting for, and had recognised each other immediately. He thinks about what she had told him... about her flat, anout the loneliness, about the ten years of slowly being told that she was the problem. And it was also the way she had told it, without self-pity, with a wry precision that had moved him more than self-pity would have.
He thinks about her face on the screen. Her laugh. The way she had lowered her arms to reveal the small breasts she was so ashamed of. The specific courage of it, and the look on her face afterwards when he had told her the truth about what he saw.
He thinks about her saying: I've never loved anyone the way I love you. And the way she had said it... not dramatically, not as a declaration performed for effect, but with the slight shock of someone hearing themselves say a thing they hadn't quite known was true until it came out.
He paces the length of the balcony. Seven steps and turn. Seven steps and turn.
We were meant to be. She had said that too. He had said it back and meant it in every cell. And he had known... he is honest enough to know that he had known... that the meant-to-be had an enormous structural problem, that the Universe had arranged the rightness of them in a configuration that did not permit the reality of them, and he had gone there anyway, had taken her hand and walked through the door. Because what was the alternative? To have been cautious? To have protected himself from this?
He would do it again without a moment's hesitation. That is the thing. Knowing everything, he would do it again.
He goes back inside.
He opens his email.
He sits at the kitchen table and he begins to write, and deletes it, and begins again, and this is harder than anything he has written in years because the difficulty is not finding the words but finding the right ones, the ones that say what needs to be said without adding to whatever is already happening in a flat in southeast England, without making things harder for her, without the burden of his own grief becoming another thing she has to manage. Whatever he sends, if his assumption is correct, it will not be read by her alone.
He writes:
Dear Lizzie,
I think I understand what's happened. And therefore I want to say first, and most importantly, that I am deeply, utterly sorry. I didn't want any of the hurt that may have come to you because of me. If you are dealing with consequences right now, I apologise that my part in this has made your life harder. It will be a sad regret I'll have to carry from hereon afterwards.
I just need to tell you one thing, and then I will leave you alone.
You are one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. I don't say that to reopen anything or to put pressure on you, I say it because it is true. You are sharp and funny and brave and honest and so astonishingly beautiful, and the bravery and honesty especially... the way you told me the truth about your life, even when it was hard...those are not small things and most people spend their whole lives learning to do just that.
You deserve to be seen. You deserve to be cherished. Don't let anyone talk you out of knowing that. Not even yourself!
I won't reach out again after this, I promise. Whatever you need to do, whatever your life requires of you now, I will not be another complication. You already have enough of those.
Thank you, Lizzie. For being the wonderful person that you are. For talking to me. For everything you've given me. For your trust, your honesty and your laughter. I want you to know that you've changed something in me. I came to that site out of desperation and loneliness and I found, against all probability, the proof that the thing I had stopped believing in was real. That's yours. You've given me that.
I hope you are all right and I wish you nothing but joy and happiness, wherever this life will take you.
Now I will let you go.
Take care of yourself.
Michael
He reads it back. He doubts every word, afraid that it will make Lizzie’s hurt even greater but leaves it as it is because it is true and she deserves the truth.
He especially thinks about whether sending it will makes things worse. He thinks about Don reading. If it is true that he's found out, this is very likely. He rewrites the opening, softens anything that could be held up as evidence of anything beyond what it is, which is a goodbye from a man who wants nothing from her except for her to be all right.
He reads it one final time.
His heart is racing.
Once he sends it, there's no more taking it back.
Little beads of sweat are glistening on his forehead and it's not from the Australian heat alone.
"Oh God, Lizzie..."
He closes his eyes, then opens them again.
He reads it one last time.
He clicks send.
It is done. What has he done. Was it really about giving her closure or was it about himself? Isn't it because he doesn't want to let her go, even when she has chosen that he cannot be a part of her life anymore? Isn't he being selfish right now? She's a grown woman. She can decide for herself, can't she?
But that's exactly the point. If Lizzie had had doubts or wanted to end this, she would have told him. She'd never have left him in the dark. Therefore, her sudden disappearance wasn't her decision. It cannot have been. And Michael believes he is entitled to closure just as much as she is, or at least an explanation.
He waits.
Both sides of his turmoil keep tearing him apart.
And he is not even sure what he is waiting for. She has blocked him everywhere, which is its own kind of message. If she replies at all, what sort of reply does he expect? He tells himself he does not expect a reply as he checks his email for the third time in five minutes. He stands at the balcony door and comes back to the table and sits down and stands up again.
The lighthouse has begun its work. He can see the beam from where he's standing, the slow, patient sweep of it across the darkening water, and he watches it go around and come back and go around again and he thinks about her in the grey February flat, and he thinks about what is happening there right now, and he hopes with everything he has that she is all right.
Then, twenty-three minutes after he's sent it, a reply arrives.
He sees the notification and his heart jolts equally with hope and dread, and he opens it immediately, and he reads it once, and then he sits very still.
My husband found out. This can't go on. Please don't contact me again. I don't want to do anything harsh.
He reads it again.
He sets his phone down on the table and he looks at it, lying there, and he feels the specific, physical blow of it. Not metaphorical. An actual sensation in his chest, a pressure, as though something structural has given way that prevents him from breathing.
He picks the phone up and reads it a third time, as though the third reading might yield something the first two didn't... some warmth hidden in the syntax, some trace of her between the lines. The sentences are short and sealed and they do not sound like her. They do not have her rhythm, her openness, the quality he has come to recognise over ten days as specifically, irreducibly Lizzie. There is no honestly tucked into a clause. There is no wry aside. There is not a single word that she would have chosen freely.
Please don't contact me again.
She has said please. Even here, even in this, she has said please. This is the real Lizzie coming through.
I don't want to do anything harsh.
This is the real Lizzie being silenced.
He puts the phone face-down on the table.
He stands up. He goes to the balcony and grips the railing with both hands and looks at the ocean and the lighthouse and the distant amber smear of Melbourne to the west, and he breathes, and the waves do their relentless work on the rocks below, and the beam sweeps out across the water and comes back, and he thinks:
Those were not her words.
She was not alone when she wrote that.
She said please.
He goes back inside and sits at the kitchen table and he reads the message one more time, and then he puts the phone in his pocket because looking at it is not helping. Then he goes out into the Australian night, and he walks.
The park is quiet.
He walks without direction, hands in his pockets, the night air warm in the way of local summers: oppressive, omnipresent, carrying the smell of eucalyptus and salt. He follows the path without seeing it.
He reads the message in his head. He has already memorised it, which was not something he chose to do but simply something that happened.
My husband found out.
He thinks about Lizzie's flat. He has a picture of it assembled from the details he had seen during their video calls. He thinks about her there right now, tonight, and what tonight looks like, and he finds he cannot think about it for very long without having to redirect his mind somewhere else.
He thinks about what she'd said to him. All of it, the accumulation of it. The map. The surgery suggestion. The pub. The university degree she'd given up because of Don, the gemmology she'd loved and left behind, the years of being told she was the problem, getting in her head, making herself sad.
He thinks about the woman who had told him all of that with honesty and precision and the courage of someone who had stopped, at least for a while, editing themselves into acceptability. And he thinks about where she is tonight, or this morning in her case, and with whom, and what is being said.
She said please, he thinks again. Even then.
He walks for a long time. The park moves around him, indifferent, its own life proceeding on its own terms, and he is a man in a park in the middle of it with a phone in his pocket and a message he has memorised and seven days of something extraordinary that has just been closed from the other side.
Was it enough? he thinks. To have had it at all?
He doesn't know yet. He thinks it might be. He thinks that in some weeks or months, at a distance he cannot currently see, the answer might be yes. Maybe seven days of real is more than many people get in a lifetime. Maybe she gave him the proof he had stopped believing in.
But that is a later thought for a later version of himself.
Right now he is here, in this park, in this night, and the answer is simply: no. No, it was not enough. It was everything and it was not enough and those two things are both true and he is going to have to learn to carry them simultaneously, and he will, because he is forty-eight years old and he has carried things before.
He stops walking.
He looks up at the sky... the southern sky, his sky, the stars arranged in their unfamiliar southern patterns that he has lived under for twenty years and still sometimes forgets are different from the ones she sees.
He thinks: She is looking at a different sky.
He thinks: She knows where to turn at that crossing.
He puts his hands back in his pockets.
He walks home.
---------
In a flat in southeast England, the laptop is open on the desk.
Don stands behind Lizzie's shoulder, close enough that she can feel the frightening aura of his proximity. The specific notion of being watched.
She has typed the message. The absolute minimum of words and a please. She has read it back and her hands have not moved and she has not let herself think about Michael sitting in his house in Melbourne.
She's pressed send.
She hears Don exhale behind her. Not quite satisfied. Something adjacent to it.
"Good," he says. "You've handled that very well."
She stares at the screen.
"Things are going to be different," he says, and his voice has the same awkward restraint it had last night. A new sort of careful gentleness, the man reassembling himself into someone she might stay for.
"Things are going to change, Lizzie. I mean that."
She nods.
She is looking at the sent message, those few words, and she is thinking about who wrote them, which was technically her, and what they said, which was true, and what they didn't say, which was everything else, and what they must have felt like to read, which she cannot let herself fully imagine.
And she holds that... the small, painful comfort of it, the only thing she has left to hold as she follows Don to the kitchen, and the evening continues, and life continues, and the radiator ticks its useless tick, and outside the February window the street goes about its ordinary business entirely indifferent to the fact that something real has just been switched off at its source.
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