Dozens of them.

I had imagined, in my self-pitying way, that the silence of those six months had been mutual — that she had gone quiet as I had, that we had drifted apart into a shared and dignified distance.

The list told the truth.

The silence had not been mutual at all.

She had been calling the entire time, reaching and reaching, into what she must eventually have come to believe was a deliberate refusal, while I sat on the other side of a wall of my own design and mistook her muffled, blocked, systematically discarded voice for the quiet of a woman who had moved on.

There is a specific shame in seeing, in a plain column on a screen, the exact record of how hard someone tried to reach you, and how completely you had arranged never to be reached.