The Last Message

The lightning illuminated everything—her half-empty closet, the dust motes floating in the stillness, the cat watching from the doorway with those judgmental yellow eyes. Naomi sat on the edge of the bed, thumb hovering over her iPhone screen. David's last message waited there, three hours old: *Can we talk?*

Outside, thunder rattled the windowpanes. The storm had rolled in around dusk, sudden and violent, much like their fight that morning. Not a fight, really. She'd stopped calling them fights years ago. They were just... quiet erasures. Small things withdrawn until nothing remained.

The cat, Bowie, crept closer and butted his head against her knee. She stroked his fur automatically, eyes still fixed on the screen. She'd been waiting for this text, dreading it, somehow certain it would come tonight of all nights.

*Your father's heart attack wasn't the tragedy,* her mother had told her once, over whiskey and road noise, somewhere in Ohio. *The tragedy was that I couldn't bring myself to care anymore.*

Naomi had thought her mother cruel then. She understood now.

Another flash of lightning. Bowie startled, then settled back against her leg, purring through the thunder that followed. The phone buzzed in her hand—David again. *I'm outside.*

She set the iPhone on the nightstand beside her half-packed suitcase. Through the window, she could see his silhouette against the storm-gray streetlight, head tilted toward her window like he used to do when they first met, twenty and foolish and certain that love was enough.

Some things, she realized, were like lightning: brilliant and destructive and impossible to hold. You could only stand in their aftermath and survey what they'd burned down.

Bowie meowed—a question, an accusation. Naomi stood up, leaving the phone where it lay, and walked to the window. She didn't open it. Some doors, once closed, should stay that way.