EPISODE TEN: THE LAST PAGE
David, Elena, Maya and I stood in a corridor that had gone, in the space of a few minutes, from ordinary to unbearable. The machines on the other side of that door made a sound I will hear, I think, for the rest of my life, a rhythmic, clinical urgency that had nothing to do with the woman it was trying to save and everything to do with the mechanics of trying to save her anyway.
I thought of Claire. I want to say that plainly, because I have spent twelve years arranging my life so that I would never have to stand in a hallway like this one again, waiting for news that might arrive in a shape I could not survive, and here I was regardless, exactly where I had sworn, at eighteen, I would never let myself stand twice.
I did not run from it this time. I want that on record too. I stood there, my hands doing nothing useful, Elena's fingers finding my sleeve at some point without either of us acknowledging it, and I let the fear be exactly as large as it actually was, instead of doing what I had always done before, which was to make myself smaller so the fear would have less of me to hold onto.
It felt, strangely, like the first brave thing I had done in over a decade.
They let me in briefly, once she had stabilized enough for a single visitor, a nurse's quiet concession to whatever she had seen in my face in the corridor. Sophie was awake, barely, her eyes finding mine with the particular effort of someone surfacing from somewhere very deep and very far away.
I did not perform the careful distance I had kept for weeks. There was no version of this moment large enough to hold a lie, however small, however kindly intended.
"It's me," I said. "The bus stop. Mr. Glenn. I heard you sing that stupid song for five months before I ever saw your face, and I have loved you since sometime around the third Saturday, though it took me embarrassingly long to admit that, even to myself."
Her mouth moved, the ghost of the smile I had come to recognize as entirely, unmistakably hers. "I know," she said, barely more than breath. "I've known since you tapped your fingers on that chair. You've always done that. Even at the bus stop, I think, though I could never see it, only hear it in your voice somehow."
"Why didn't you say anything," I asked, though I already suspected, by then, most of the answer.
"Because I wanted to be loved as Sophie," she said, "for however many days I had left. Not as an illness. I wanted to hear you say ordinary things. That it rained today. That the hospital soup is terrible. That there's a dog somewhere in London that insists on wearing a little yellow coat." Her hand found mine, weaker than it had been even that morning, but certain. "I wanted to be your Sophie. Not your dying girl. There's a difference, and I needed you not to know which one you were sitting with."
I was crying by then, without any of the composure I would have liked to offer her in that moment, and I found I did not have it in me to be ashamed of that.
"I love you," I said, the sentence finally arriving whole, no longer split into careful, safer fragments. "I love you, Sophie. I should have said it the day you told me about the flower."
"I love you too," she said, and there was no hesitation in it at all, none of the careful weighing she gave almost everything else. "I have for longer than either of us was brave enough to admit out loud."
She lifted her hand to my face again, the way she had once before, and this time I did not hold back either. I kissed her, gently, the two of us finally arriving at the choice we had spent weeks agreeing to wait for, and it was, in every way that mattered, exactly what we had wanted it to be: not a reflex reached for out of fear, but a decision, made in full clarity, by two people who had finally run out of reasons to keep waiting.
When our lips parted, the monitor beside her bed held a single tone, long and even, the sound a heart makes when it has finally, gently, decided to stop asking anything more of itself.
Sophie died in my arms, in the middle of a kiss that was, at once, the first and the last thing that ever passed between us in the flesh.
I do not remember, clearly, the hours immediately after. I remember Elena's hand over her mouth. I remember David standing very still, the way men of his generation stand when they have decided that falling apart is a luxury owed to someone else in the room first. I remember Maya, quietly, without being asked, taking my arm and simply staying beside me, the way you stay beside someone you have decided, without discussion, not to leave alone.
After the funeral, which I will not describe in detail, because some things are owed privacy even in the telling, Elena came to find me. She was holding the folder, the manuscript, its corners softer now from even more handling than before.
"She wanted you to have this," Elena said. "All of it. She was very specific."
I opened it that night, alone in the narrow flat above the launderette, and found, in the very back, tucked behind the last drawn page, a note in Sophie's own hand, the letters less steady than they had once been but unmistakably hers.
If you're reading this, it said, it means I've gone. I knew who you were almost from the first afternoon you walked into that day room, though I let you believe otherwise for longer than I probably should have, because I wanted a little more time being loved plainly, before either of us had to carry the weight of saying so. Don't turn what we had into a locked room, Ryan. Don't seal it away and call it grief. Open the windows. Let people in. Finish the ending. You already know how it goes.
I stayed in London. I want to say that plainly too, because leaving would have been the easier, more forgivable choice, and I did not take it. I finished the manuscript's last page myself, working from everything she had told me across five months of Saturdays and eight weeks of afternoons, careful to write in a hand close enough to hers that the transition, on the page, would feel less like a handoff and more like a single, continuous breath.
Protea, in the end, does not get her magic restored. There is no reunion drawn in soft, hopeful colors, no easy return to the bench at four o'clock. But Mr. Glenn continues, in the final pages, walking through the cities she once loved without ever fully explaining to the reader, carrying her story forward the way you carry a lit candle through a house whose power has gone out, not because the light fixes anything, but because a house is easier to move through when something in it still remembers how to shine.
I published it under both names, exactly as she had lettered them on that very first page: Sophie Collins, and beneath it, her chosen name, Protea. I did not correct or soften a single panel of what she had already drawn. I only finished what she could not.
I still go to the park most days, a little before four. I do not know, entirely, why I keep the habit, except that some rituals outlive the reasons we started them and become, instead, their own quiet form of company. I do not hear her voice anymore. The line, whatever it was, whatever strange mercy of the universe once allowed two strangers on opposite sides of an ocean to find each other through nothing but sound, closed the moment we finally stood in the same room, exactly as she once told me it would, though neither of us understood, at the time, that she was explaining a rule rather than making an observation.
For a long while, the silence frightened me. It sounded, at first, exactly like every other silence I had spent twelve years running from.
It does not sound like that anymore.
Four o'clock, and London goes on moving in front of me, buses and pigeons and a flower cart two streets over that still gets in everyone's way on Tuesdays. There is no voice rising up from another city to meet mine. But I know, sitting there, that Sophie left something behind in me that cannot disappear, no matter how long the bench stays quiet: a reason to keep listening to the rest of my life, all the way to whatever its own last page turns out to be.