of believing I had failed a girl I loved.
“Why now?” I asked.
David finally looked at me.
“Chloe called me last week.”
“Why?”
He hesitated.
Then he explained.
A few weeks earlier, I had run into our neighbor Margaret at the grocery store.
She had asked about Chloe.
Without thinking, I called her “my girl.”
Margaret’s daughter Maya happened to be friends with Chloe.
Somehow the comment reached her.
And Maya told Chloe something else.
That for years, I had continued asking about her.
That I had never hated
