Chapter 8: Show Me — A Trucker's Long-Distance Love Story
Elena's silence was rarely empty. Daniel kept filling it anyway. That was the problem. By the first week of March, her absence from the phone no longer felt neutral to him. Before, silence had meant she was working. Sleeping. With Mateo. On the bus. Cleaning. Talking to family. Trying to survive whatever the day had decided to become. Daniel knew all of that. He knew it intellectually. Emotionally, silence had begun acquiring other meanings. Maybe she was pulling away. Maybe he had said too much. Maybe she did not feel what he felt. Maybe he mattered less. The phone was a terrible instrument for this. It could tell him whether a message had been sent. Sometimes whether it had been seen. It could not tell him what happened in the minutes afterward. So Daniel supplied the missing information himself. That was rarely useful. * * * Saturday had been bad. Not catastrophic. Worse, in some ways. Ordinary bad. The kind that accumulated. Freight. Time. Hours....