Worth the Trouble ✓

28 | phantom

THINGS CHANGED FASTER THAN I wanted them to.

And it's my fault.

In the weeks immediately following her move to Ranscher, whenever we spoke on the phone, Suki and I would end up sobbing and making our words unintelligible. I hated being separated from her. She missed me a lot, so we'd message back and forth late into the night, early in the morning, through school, through work, through everything. She was still the person I wanted to tell about my day. She was still the person who calmed my heartbreak, even if she was the one to cause it.

She'd send me photos of their new house and her newly decorated room and how she set up the nursery in light blue, though Cassie is a girl. We talked constantly through messages, though I found that I ended up crying anyway and blurring the digital text on my screen. But I made do.

The nearer it got to Cassie's due date, the more our messages dwindled. Suki would be online less and less, replying with hours in between each message. It was difficult to keep a deep, thoughtful conversation going at such a stunted pace, so naturally, our messages slipped into small-talk territory. How was school? How's the new house? How's the job?

Once she put forth the prospect of me flying out to Ranscher for a week. She said I deserved to be there when my daughter came into the world, and she wouldn't want anyone else by her side. And I thought (and said it, too): there wasn't a guarantee that I would see the birth even if I went that week. Who would I stay with? Who would pay for the flights?

The idea of spending all the money I worked for over the winter holiday on return flights for the off-chance that Cassie's birth would land in the doctors' ballpark and, at best, having to go home a handful of days later, just seemed insane. No way I would do that. I could fly out once she was born. No fucking way.

And I could tell things ended that day.

Brittany noticed my mood. She begged for company at some college party in Halston—claiming she couldn't drive—and asked me to drive. I saw through it; she was trying to get my mind off Cassie's impending due date and the sickening reality of how quickly my life flew off the rails.

So, when Cassie was born, I wasn't even awake.

I was six feet under a dozen bottles of beer, plastered on a moth-worn couch in some off-campus house. Girls would flop down on the arm and breathe damp questions into my ear over the thudding music. The party-goers were nearly all Halston University students, and I never asked how Brittany earned an invitation.

Suki was too tired to let me know when labour had started. I understood completely, but I also knew that her cousins knew who I was. Any of them, Niko, and Haru could have reached out, but no-one did. It stung to feel so excluded, but then relief at having escaped the gut-wrenching fear and stress of labour prickled the back of my neck. Guilt followed immediately, but it wasn't as consuming as it used to be.

If I had agreed to Suki's plan of flying out to Halston, I would have missed the birth anyways. Cassie came early in her gestation, and early in the morning. I would never have willingly been drunk the day my daughter was born, at a healthy weight, on the eighth of March.

And she's gorgeous, like her mom.

In our next phone call, she apologised. Labour took her into the early hours of the morning, and the time zone difference was not something she expected me to absorb. In fact, she didn't expect much of me anymore.

In our conversations, she was so accommodating and understanding and low-maintenance about my obligations to her and Cassie. The dynamic changed. I went from boyfriend to friend to weird phantom without ever breaking up with her. I could just tell—ever since I refused to fly out to Ranscher—she started finding support elsewhere.