Rory
I woke up to Dray's message still sitting unanswered on my phone, ten hours old, and understood within about four seconds of reading it again that I had genuinely no idea what to say back that wouldn't either lie or detonate something neither of us was ready for.
I read the message six more times before I even got out of bed, each pass through the same eighteen words landing with a slightly different weight — *I don't know what to do with that information yet, but I wanted you to know it's true.* Careful phrasing, the kind of sentence written and rewritten before it was ever sent, and knowing that only made the weight of not answering it feel heavier.
I'd fallen asleep before it arrived, exhausted from the drive, and by the time I found it in the morning, the moment it had been sen
