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“So, how have you been?”
Anatoly’s tone is conversational, infuriatingly so. The voice Florence hears on the other end of the phone is a voice she knows extremely well, and for most of that history what she knew was the warm, intimate tone of a lover. All of that is gone. The intimacy is long dead, of course, and so is the way she remembers him talking.
If she can’t have that back, can’t she at least ask for Anatoly to be hurting over what he’s done and what he’s lost? He sounds calm. Unaffected.
“I’m still alive,” is the most positive response she can truthfully give him.
“I can say the same,” he says, voice flat. “It’s been… I’ve been in a hard place.”
You did that to yourself! she wants to yell into the receiver. You made your bed; fucking lie in it!
Florence does not say this; she nods as if he can see the gesture and offers her reply in an equally empty tone: “Me too.”
The silence is awkward. Silence between them used to be intimate, calm. That’s gone. This silence is oppressive. Looming.
“I’m sorry.”
Florence purses her lips together.
“I know that.” It’s unnecessarily cruel, but she can’t accept the apology.
“I should have done better by you.”
“No,” she says. “No. Don’t talk to me like that. We both have regrets. We can’t fix them. It’ll hurt too much to think about what we should or could have done. The moment’s gone.”
Stunned silence.
“You — you know what I should have done?” Florence spills. “I should have left you sooner. I regret that more than anything, Anatoly. No amount of ‘doing good by each other’ would have fixed the way it was doomed from the start. I should have known. From the beginning. From the fact that you’re, that you’re fucking married.
“It hurt so much. The way we ended. Yes, I wish I’d held on tighter, I wish I’d convinced you to throw the match, I wish it’d been another place, another time, sure, but more than anything I wish the end had come swifter.”
This is only half of what Florence feels, of course. Part of her wants to let down all her precautions, let all her misgivings go, let Anatoly back in. As painful as it ended, she would be a fool to deny how special that spark between them was. Perhaps, she acknowledges, it was nothing more than infatuation, just her first fully-realized schoolgirl crush arriving fifteen years late. It was still all for Anatoly.
But he doesn’t deserve the second chance she so badly wants to give him. She focuses on her anger, her betrayal, hones and amplifies those feelings so the others don’t dare stray from the closed-off place in her heart she’s stuffed them.
She hears Anatoly’s breathing on the other end.
“I’m sorry, Florence.”
Anatoly has always been quite like a wall.
There was a time when it seemed he was a wall between Florence and all her traumas and demons, silently protecting her, holding her, making her feel safe.
And then he was a wall between Florence and herself, hurting instead of helping. A wall between Florence and her autonomy. Her dignity. Her father.
And now he is simply a wall. Florence is talking to a brick wall who won’t acknowledge her words.
“How’s Svetlana doing?” Florence asks. She genuinely wants to know, but still indulges herself in the mental image of Anatoly flinching at the question.
“She’s…” He hesitates. “She’s been fine. I know it’s too late for us, and she knows that too. I’ve just been trying to keep things as normal for our daughters as I can.”
“That’s good,” Florence replies, hollow. She wants to scream at him, ask why he didn’t care about fathers and daughters back in Bangkok.
“Are you still in contact with Freddie?” Oh, so it’s Anatoly’s turn to ask a painful question.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He still wants me back.” She doesn’t mention the way her opinion on him has been trying to shift, the way she plays that stupid “he won’t help you; he won’t throw the match!” conversation over and over in her head with the sinking realization that Freddie was right. Freddie does not deserve a second chance either; Florence has treated him with just as much frigidity as she shows Anatoly now.
(She realizes that she’s agonizingly lonely after having Anatoly and losing him, and that now she’s desperate for someone, anyone, to fill that void. In all likelihood, that must be the only reason her resolve on the subject of Freddie dares to budge. By all means, she refuses to forgive Freddie for every horrible thing he’s said, every low blow he’s taken. He fights dirty, and many of Florence’s emotional wounds would have healed much quicker if not for Freddie reopening them whenever he didn’t get his way. That’s not something she would ever, ever go back to. She has many more of those wounds now. He has so much more ammunition now.)
“Is he still with Global?” Thank God Anatoly doesn’t pry any further on Freddie’s interest in Florence.
“No,” she replies. “He walked out on them pretty much as soon as you went back home. He’s bouncing from job to job now.”
“Oh.” He hums. “What about you? What have you been up to, work-wise?”
“I’m…” she feels oddly vulnerable exposing this to him — “I’m going back to school. Going into social work.”
“I see,” he replies, sounding mildly surprised. “Social work, huh? You’ll do great.”
He pauses.
“I miss you,” he says.
I miss you too itches to jump out of Florence’s mouth, but she swallows it down. “You have a wife, Anatoly,” she says.
“I know.” His voice is so quiet as he says this that Florence has to strain to pick him up through the phone speaker.
She sighs.
“I’ll never forget what we had,” she admits. “It’s gone now, and it was never built to last in the first place, but… It was special while it was real.”
“Yeah,” Anatoly replies. “It was.”
She swallows. “It was nice catching up with you, Anatoly.”
“You too, Florence.”
She makes herself hang up.