THE LAST CALL

He promised he’d leave. She kept answering anyway.

She was tired of saying goodbye.

It wore her down.

She began to dread the calls—the quiet ring of the phone now synonymous with grief.

She resented the tears, the thousands she’d shed, summoned by the fragile rasp of his voice.

A voice that used to be booming. Certain. Alive.

He had told her long ago what he wanted.

“I’m going to kill myself,” he said once, then again, and again—each time with the clarity of someone describing the weather.

“I’ll never let myself become that,” he’d say, pointing discreetly to an elderly man hunched in a wheelchair, half-asleep or half-gone.
She believed him.

He never lied. Not once. Not even when she begged for it.
Even his promises of death rang with a terrible kind of honesty.

Today felt like it might be the last call.

The final whisper of breath between them.

The final lump in her throat.

The last ache in her chest.

The last goodbye.

The last time she wished she could help him finish what he started.