The Weight of Silence

Chapter Three

Alvarez’s POV

“Guess what, man. I fucked her. She was easy. You should have seen her face.”

The laugh felt wrong the second it left my mouth. The guys at the table cheered and slapped my back like I had scored some kind of point, but their noise only made the ache bigger. I forced a grin and downed the rest of my beer while the bar spun in soft circles around me.

I should have walked away. I should have left before the words came out. But once they were there, once they hung in the air, I could not take them back.

Diego leaned in, his voice low. “Alvarez, you are not doing yourself any favours, man. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, but my voice sounded hollow. I scanned the room like it would give me a way out. People were wrapped in small groups, talking, laughing, living their own lives. None of them knew how loud my chest felt. None of them knew how much it hurt.

On the walk home, the city was a blur of lights and small noises. I walked fast, hands jammed into my pockets. My head replayed the night with Maya, the argument that had started with a joke and become something I could not repair. I remembered her standing in the doorway, trying to be calm, and then the look that came over her when she heard what I said. The way her body folded into herself was like she had been struck.

What I did was stupid. I knew that. I told myself the other man was nothing, just a mistake, a moment where I let my guard down and my ugly took over. But when I pictured her, crying into the pillow, the taste of pride in my mouth turned sour.

I got home, and the apartment felt empty, but this time, the emptiness cut the worst. No sound of her making tea. No little notes left on the fridge. No way to pretend everything was fine. I threw myself onto the couch and let my phone blink in the dark. Her number stayed dark. No reply, no angry voice, no silence that meant she was thinking about me. Nothing but my own breath.

The next morning my mom was in the kitchen before the sun came up. She had a way of moving like she was holding the house together with her hands. She looked up when I shuffled in, not surprised to see me late, but watching for signs I was falling apart.

“You look tired,” she said. Her voice had that soft edge that always made me feel small. I shrugged, pushed cereal into a bowl, and sat while she watched me. I could not keep the truth from her. I could not keep anything from her.

“It is Maya, isn’t it?” she asked after a long minute.

I kept my eyes on the spoon. I heard it scrape the bowl, slow and empty. “We had a fight,” I said. Saying it out loud made it truer than the silence had.

She sat across from me, hands folded. “Did you do something to hurt her?” Her voice was calm but the words were heavy.

“I said some things,” I admitted. I wanted to say it was not just me, that she had pushed, that she had been cold, that it had been a mess of both of us. But the truth was cleaner and sharper. I cheated. I let a moment of weakness become a weapon. I had wielded it like proof she did not need me.

“Alvarez,” she said softly, and then she went quiet, the kind of silence that meant she was trying to think of a way to say the thing I needed to hear. “You need to fix it.”

I wanted to tell her I could. I wanted to tell her I would climb up to her window if I had to and beg and promise and kneel. But when I looked at my hands, those same hands that had dragged me into the mess, I felt like a stranger. I did not know how to promise that I would be different without making it sound like words.

Later that afternoon, I ran into Leah by chance at the corner store. She stood with a list in her hand, eyes cold. The moment she saw me she dropped her bag and approached like she would have a fight if I tried to step away.

“You know what you did?” she asked straight away. There was no small talk, no chill. Just the truth thrown across the aisle.

“Yeah,” I said, because there was nothing else.

“Do you know how much she cries?” Her voice tightened, and I flinched under the weight of it. “Do you know how she walks around like she is waiting for a train that never comes? Stop making it worse.”

Her words stuck to my skin. I tried to shrug them off, but they did not go away. I stood there like an idiot, watching her walk off, clutching the bag like it would make her feel safer.

That night I walked over to her street. I did not know why I had gone. Maybe I thought the house would let me in if I knocked loud enough. Maybe I wanted to see the place where she had left. Maybe I wanted to punish myself with the sight of the door she had shut.

From across the street, her window glowed faintly. I watched for a long time. I wanted to see the silhouette of her, to know she was okay. What I saw instead was the porchlight. An empty porch. A quiet home. A life I had helped break.

My phone started buzzing, one message after the other. Friends asking how I was. People who saw my nonsense online wanted to know if I was okay. I left them unanswered. If I answered, I would speak and speaking would mean something. I did not want to have to explain. I did not want to own the thing I had done.

Back inside my apartment I paced, too restless to sit. Memories came at me like small knives. The first time she laughed at something stupid I said. The time we got lost on the ferry and she found it funny. The mornings curled in bed while rain fell and we made half promises. All the things that had once made us a team.

And then the bad things. The nights I stayed out and she called and I ignored. The times we shouted because one tiny thing turned into something old and ugly. The moments I let my pride keep me quiet when I should have said I was wrong.

I sat down at my desk and opened my messages. I scrolled until I found the text I had sent her after the bar. The words were harsher than I remembered. Seeing them written made it worse. I wanted to tear the phone in half.

I texted her. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted. My thumbs hovered over the screen for a long time. In the end, I wrote something small and stupid. I told her to meet me so I could explain. I hit send before I could think of a reason not to.

The three little dots appeared. Her typing. My chest lurched. I waited. They stopped. No new message. My hands went cold. For a second I thought my phone had frozen, but it was not that. She had read it and decided not to answer. Maybe she was walking away already.

I left the apartment and walked without really knowing where I was going. I found myself at the old park where we used to go sometimes late at night. There was a bench under a tree where we had once sat and talked about stupid things like what we wanted to do with our lives. I sat and put my face in my hands.

I could feel the weight pressing down on me. Pride was heavy. Guilt heavier. If I were honest, fear was the worst. Fear that she would find someone steady and kind. Fear that the small easy moments I took for granted would belong to another man.

I did not want that. I wanted her to come back and tell me she forgave me. I wanted to rebuild what we had. But rebuilding sounded like a repair with no guarantee. What if the cracks were too big?

I stayed on the bench until the sky started to lighten. People passed, heading home or to early shifts. The world did not stop for me. It did not slow its steps because I had wrecked something with my hands.

When I walked back to my apartment, my legs felt heavier. I opened the door and went straight to my desk. I sat down and whispered to the empty room, “I could have fixed us.”

No answer came. The apartment kept its silence and I sat with the truth that maybe I had already made it impossible.