Please come back.

I’ll fix it.

I’ll do anything, anything you want, just — come home.”

He said my name three times in that call, like a handhold. Corinne.

Corinne.

Please, Corinne. Sixteen years, and I think it was the most he’d said my actual name in the last five of them.\n\nThere was a version of me, not far in the past, who would have folded at the sound of it.

That woman had spent so long being the one who fixed things that a crying man asking for help would have reached her before her own judgment could.