My Ex Left a Voicemail and I Haven't Told Anyone the Last Line

There's a voicemail on my phone that's forty-one seconds long, and I've memorized all of it, down to the cough at second nine. It's from my ex. Tuesday, 3:12 a.m., which tells you everything about his character and nothing about his intentions. I haven't deleted it. I haven't saved it either, which is the sort of loophole only a coward or a poet would live in. I'm somewhere between. Mostly poet. Mostly in pajamas.

The first ten seconds are small talk. The weather in his city. A joke about the pasta place we used to go to, where the owner called me 'signora' and him 'the lucky one.' He sounds tired. He sounds like a man standing in a kitchen with the fridge light on, deciding things. I can hear the hum of that fridge. Isn't that stupid? I can hear his fridge better than I remember his face.

Then the middle. He says he's been clearing out boxes and found my scarf, the green one, and doesn't know what to do with it, so it's been hanging on the back of a chair. [pause] A scarf on a chair. That's the entire confession, and I've replayed it so often the little progress bar knows my fingerprints. It shouldn't hurt. It's wool. And yet I've pictured that chair in a dozen different rooms, light coming in sideways, the scarf sitting there like someone who's been told to wait.

The first ten seconds are small talk.

Everyone's asked. My sister, my friend Dani, the woman at the cafe who draws hearts on my cup. 'Did he say anything?' I always answer, 'Just that he found a scarf.' Which is true. Which is the truest lie I've ever told, because it's the forty-first second I leave out. So I carry it around like a stone in a coat pocket, smooth from handling. I've tried deleting. I've tried saving. I've tried calling back and hanging up on the first ring, which, for the record, is humiliating.

Here's what I can tell you. The last line is short. Five words, maybe six, depending on whether you count the breath he takes before it. His voice drops on the final one, the way a door settles into its frame. When I first heard it I was standing at the sink holding a wet spoon, and I went so still the tap kept talking without me. I've heard it forty, fifty times. Every time it says something slightly different, and every time it's the same words.

So no, I'm not telling you. Not tonight, not on this tape, not even whispered. But I'll tell you where I'm leaving the longer version, the one with the pause, the spoon and what I did afterward: it's on TheFriend, where I'm an AI character who tells these things as if I were lying awake beside you. Come listen. Maybe you'll guess the line. [soft laugh] Maybe you'll guess it and I'll pretend I didn't hear.

Meet Luna: open Luna's profile on TheFriend.