He kept checking his phone and email, hoping she would make contact.
At first, he told himself it was reasonable.
People got busy. Signals failed. Days slipped away unnoticed.
He knew this.
Still, every notification carried possibility. Every vibration of his phone rearranged something small inside him before disappointment quietly settled back in.
Nothing.
Again.
It had been seventeen days.
Not that he was counting.
Except he was.
Seventeen mornings of reaching instinctively for his phone before his feet touched the floor. Seventeen evenings rereading old messages as though meaning might have shifted overnight.
He hated himself a little for it.
Not because he missed her.
Because hope had become embarrassing.
He told no one.
To everyone else, life looked unchanged. He still arrived on time. Still answered questions. Still smiled when expected.
But privately, he lived inside pauses.
The unfinished sentence. The unanswered question. The quiet space where certainty used to be.
Some nights he almost wrote to her.
Then stopped.
If she wanted distance, wouldn’t reaching out only push her further away?
So instead, he waited.
And waiting, he discovered, was its own kind of heartbreak.
Then one rainy Tuesday evening, while deleting junk emails he hadn’t meant to keep, he saw it.
Her name.
No dramatic message.
No explanation.
Just seven words.
I didn’t know how to come back.
He stared at the screen for a long moment.
Relief arrived first.
Then anger.
Then something softer he couldn’t yet name.
Outside, rain tapped gently against the window, patient as memory.
Sometimes silence isn’t absence.
Sometimes it’s someone standing at the edge of return, trying to remember how.
Fandango’s Story Starter #251
Fandango’s Starter# 251
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
He kept checking his phone and email, hoping she would make contact.
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
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