Chapter 127 Letting go

Chapter 127 Letting go
Nora’s POV 

It was two weeks after we made the decision to let go of each other. Alexa insisted on staying longer to recover before leaving.

“I need all the strength possible before facing my family again.” She had said.

Two weeks of the apartment becoming fuller than it had been before Alexa was in it, fuller in ways that were going to be noticeable in her absence. The way the morning light found her on the sofa when she was working, laptop open, reading glasses she pretended she didn’t need sitting on her nose. The sound of her moving around in the kitchen at odd hours because the medication schedule had reorganized her relationship with sleep.

Two weeks of watching someone heal.

Not just physically…though that had been its own process, the wounds closing gradually with the patient indifference that bodies healed with regardless of the emotional landscape around them. But the other healing. The one that happened in the quiet spaces between conversations. The kind that showed up in the way she held herself differently by the second week than she had in the first. The way she laughed more easily. The way she stopped flinching slightly when she moved too fast.

She had refused to leave the day after our conversation. I had expected that. I knew it was coming when I said tomorrow and watched her face receive the word and file it somewhere that wasn’t immediate compliance.

“I need to recover first,” she had said. The tone she used when a decision had been made and what came next was just the informing of other people. “I am not going back to my daughter looking like this.”

She had gestured at herself…the healing stomach, I hadn’t argued. Partly because she was right, and partly because I had looked at the two weeks ahead of us and understood that they were what they were…a gift and a grace period, also a goodbye that was going to be given in installments rather than all at once, and I had decided to receive them for what they were rather than push against them. So she had stayed.

And the apartment had been fuller.

The remote job at Lex had been her idea. She had presented it with serious, not leaving a room for me to decline, like she had already decided.

“You’re good with words,” she had said. “Lex needs content. I need someone I trust to handle it while I’m gone.” She had looked at me across the table. “It’s not charity. I genuinely need someone and you also need something more sustainable than the restaurant.”

I had looked at her.

“Rosa on Tuesdays through Saturdays,” she had said. “Lex the rest of the time. Remote, your hours, your pace.”

“Alexa…”

“Don’t make it complicated,” she had said. “It isn’t complicated.”

It wasn’t complicated. So I had said yes.

And now I had a laptop, login credentials and a contact at Lex who had emailed me a very professional welcome and a list of immediate projects, and Rosa on Tuesdays through Saturdays, and the apartment with the south-facing windows.

I now have A life. An actual, functional, forward-pointing life. I was still adjusting to what that felt like.

It was the morning Alexa will be leaving. It arrived looking exactly like any other morning.

Same light through the curtains. Same sounds from the building and the street. She was up before me.

I found her in the kitchen when I came out, already dressed, her suitcase near the door, moving through the space like someone who had already said goodbye to a place internally and was now just finishing the physical part of it.

She looked up when I came in.

We looked at each other.

The morning held the look and didn’t rush it.

None of us tried to fill in the silence. That was something those two weeks had given us…the ability to be in the same room with the large things without immediately reaching for language to cover them. The large things could just be there. They didn’t need to be audibly addressed.

She poured me coffee without asking and set it on the counter in front of me.

I wrapped both hands around it.

“How are you feeling?” I said.

“Ready,” she said. Then, more honestly “Terrified.” She added.

“They’ll be glad to see you.” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that,” I said. “I have always known that.”

She looked at her own cup.

“What if Aria…” She stopped.

“She won’t,” I said.

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say what if Aria has pulled away. What if the distance has done something to how she looks at you.” I held her eyes. “She won’t have. She is six years old and she loves her mother with everything she has, six year olds do not revise that kind of love downward because of time.”

Alexa was quiet.

“Go,” I said. “Let her hold her arms up.”

Something moved through her face.

The car arrived at eleven. The driver was arranged through the service she used, someone who had no context for what was happening and simply showed up at the building entrance and sent a message that he was downstairs and would wait.

We stood in the apartment. The suitcase by the door. Her jacket on, her bag over her shoulder, and the laptop in its case. The photograph of Aria at three, laughing at something off camera, that she had on her bedside was already in the bag, I had watched her put it there this morning. She looked around the apartment with an attention of someone committing something to a particular kind of memory, then she looked back at me. I tried to look away, but couldn’t.

We had said all the things that need to be said. Over two weeks, we have been talking, said everything that needed saying and some things that didn’t strictly need saying, but that needed to exist out loud between us anyway. 

So now we just…looked.

The eye contact had its own language. Full, direct and unhurried, neither of us looking away. Her eyes were welling up with that familiar liquid, mine were doing the same and neither of us was going to be the one who made that worse by commenting on it.

She crossed the room. I met her halfway.

This hug was not the goodbye hug I had been steeling myself for, not the tight desperate kind, not the kind that tried to compress everything into a final contact. It was steadier than that. The hug of two people who had decided to part well and were doing it with the same honesty they had brought to everything else.

I held on, and she did the same.

Then she stepped away, picked up her suitcase, and opened the apartment door.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too,” I said.

She looked at me one more time and off she went 

I didn’t follow her to the car. I stood in the apartment door, listening to her footsteps in the corridor, till she entered the lift, and the number on the display went down.

I went to the window, the south-facing one. The one with the good light, and stood there, looking down at the street lined with tress, with the canopy that had gone full autumn gold now, the branches meeting overhead in the way that made the street feel significant from the first time we drove down it.

The car was parked below and the driver was at the wheel. She came out of the building entrance.

I watched her from the window. She stopped for a moment outside the entrance and looked up at the building. Not at my window specifically.

Then she looked down and moved toward the car.

I put my hand flat on the glass. But she couldn’t see it.

The driver got out briefly to help with the suitcase and put it in the boot, he then came back around, and got in. That’s a departure i’ll never forget in my life. It was efficient and unremarkable from the outside, not from my view.

She opened the back door, stopped with her hand on it, and looked up once more.

This time at the window. This time she found me.

We held it on for a moment, then she got into the car.

The door closed, and the car moved.

I watched it go down the street, the autumn gold moving over it as it passed beneath the canopy, getting smaller with the distance, the red of the brake lights once at the end of the junction, and then the turn.

And then the street was just there, empty of her.

I stood at the window with my hand on the glass. Accompanied by my lone tear, running down the left side of my face with the quiet inevitability of something that had been building for two weeks and had been waiting for exactly this moment to arrive.

I didn’t wipe it.

I let it go where it went.

I stood at the window of the apartment, thinking of what next life may throw at me. Because the era of Alexa has ended in my life, officially, for good.