"What are you thinking?" He asks. In the corner of her mind's eye she can see Jamil seated just outside her field of vision. The high spike of his forehead. His easy smile. The way his hair looks when it's pulled back.
She knows he's not really there, but it helps to imagine that he is when she needs someone. Someone to listen who won't judge her for anything she says.
"Nothing in particular. Just life." She replies, listening as her words echo against the plastic curtains of the clinic. He doesn't say anything, merely waits for her to continue.
"I think I thought, after I got to the 2nd Mass that things would be different. I had so much faith. But here I am two years later and I'm still alone."
Here his replies faded in her ears, falling away to the silence of the clinic. Words like 'you're not alone' and 'you can't give up now, not when you've come this far.' They hung there like what-ifs, suspended question marks that she didn't know the answer to.
"You have Anne." He finally answered. The words were hollow, though. The words of a ghost.
"No," she whispered, her voice cracking. "I never had Anne. I thought I had Anne. She reminded me of my mom. She didn't let me feel sorry for myself. But after she and Tom... Not that I begrudge her that. They belong together. But I was never going to be a part of their family. It didn't matter how long I knew them or how much I loved them."
"How strange it is, to be looking in from the outside."
She felt he was gone then, to dust. And truly, she was sitting alone in the clinic as a single tear flowed over her lids and onto her cheek. She wiped it away, pulling in a nervous breath.
"I thought, once, that maybe I could be a part of the great Mason family. They're incredible, you know. Those Masons. Unyielding and faithful. Everything I want to be. I tried. I really tried. And then you DIED." Her cry was muffled by a shaking hand, the tears streaming uninhibited down her cheeks. "I LOVED you. I thought, with him, I could be a part of their perfect family but then you came along and you changed EVERYTHING. It didn't hurt anymore that despite the fact that I was ALWAYS there they never accepted me. I was never a part of their family. You became my family."
Her face came down to fall into her hands. "And then they took you away."
"And every day I watch them. I watch that beautiful family wishing I could be a part of it. I watch him with her and know that what little shreds of hope I retained when this all started are gone because he never saw me the way I saw him. And he needs her. And they deserve each other. And she is their family now."
Like a phantom, a warm rush ran down her back, like the brush of a comforting hand. She reached back to take it, like she might have when they were still together. She would have taken his fingers and entwined them with her own, kissed his knuckles, and pressed his palm to her cheek. She imagined them there, together.
But her hand grappled with air and fell to rest against the wall instead.
"They have their family and I have no one."