It started small enough that Loid barely noticed it at first — a shorter reply here, a missed message there, nothing dramatic enough to point to directly, just a slow, gradual thinning of the easy closeness they'd built over the past weeks.
His grandmother had taken a fall the week before — nothing serious, thankfully, just a sprained wrist that made everyday tasks harder than they should have been — and Loid found himself spending more afternoons at home than usual, helping with things she normally managed on her own, too preoccupied to keep up with the small, constant thread of conversation he and Charlotte usually maintained.
He didn't think much of it. It felt, to him, like a temporary adjustment, nothing that would actually matter once his grandmother's wrist healed and things went back to normal. He didn't think to explain any of it to Charlotte, mostly because it hadn't occurred to him that his sudden quietness might read as anything other than what it actually was.
His days had taken on a new, tighter shape — home right after school instead of lingering, helping with dishes and errands his grandmother normally handled without a second thought, half his attention always somewhere in the back of his head cataloguing what still needed doing before he could finally sit down. It wasn't a burden, exactly. He didn't resent any of it. But it left considerably less room than usual for the long, meandering conversations he and Charlotte had gotten so used to having, and he simply hadn't thought to flag that shift to her directly, too preoccupied to notice the gap it was quietly opening up between them.
Charlotte, on the other hand, had started reading it very differently.
She noticed the shorter replies first — Loid's usual long, rambling messages reduced to quick, distracted responses, sometimes taking hours to arrive instead of minutes. She noticed him begging off their usual walks home more often, citing vague reasons he didn't elaborate on. She noticed, most of all, a kind of distance in his tone that hadn't been there before, subtle but unmistakable once she started actually looking for it.
She didn't ask him directly what was wrong. That was, perhaps, the mistake — though it didn't feel like one at the time, it felt like giving him space, the same courtesy he'd always given her when something was clearly bothering him. But where Loid usually opened up eventually, on his own timeline, this silence stretched longer than she was used to, and the longer it stretched, the more Charlotte's mind filled in the gaps with explanations she didn't actually have any evidence for.
Maybe he was pulling away on purpose. Maybe whatever had almost happened at the festival, on the walk home, had scared him more than she realized, and this quietness was his way of retreating from it. Maybe — and this was the thought that hurt most, the one she kept circling back to despite trying not to — maybe she'd become more of a burden than she realized, someone he now had to manage around rather than someone he actually wanted in his life.
None of it was true. But Charlotte didn't know that, not with any certainty, and instead of asking him outright, she did the thing she least wanted to do, the thing she would have told anyone else never to do in her position.
She pulled away too.
It happened quietly, the same way his distance had — a shorter reply here, a missed opportunity to suggest they walk home together there, small, deliberate withdrawals that felt, to her, like protecting herself from a rejection she'd already half-convinced herself was coming.
Loid noticed it almost immediately. Unlike Charlotte, he didn't spend days quietly assuming the worst — he'd learned that lesson already, the hard way, during the argument over Ethan weeks earlier, and he wasn't about to repeat the same mistake of letting silence fester unexamined.
He noticed the shift in her messages, the new distance in her tone, and instead of retreating further into his own preoccupation, he stopped, actually paid attention, and realized, with a jolt of something close to panic, that whatever was happening between them now looked uncomfortably similar to what had almost broken them the first time.
This time, he refused to let another misunderstanding grow unchecked. He'd learned, at least, that much.
He thought back, uncomfortably, to the argument over Ethan — how quickly a small, unexplained silence had spiraled into something that had cost them two full days of genuine hurt, all because neither of them had simply said what was actually going on. He didn't want to repeat that mistake. Not again, not over something as fixable as his grandmother's sprained wrist and a few too many distracted afternoons.
He spent that evening drafting a message to Charlotte, more careful about it than he usually was, trying to explain plainly what had actually been happening without making it sound like an excuse. He deleted it twice, dissatisfied with the tone — too formal the first time, too casual the second — before finally settling on something simple and direct, closer to what his grandmother had told him weeks earlier about apologies: don't dress it up, don't explain it away, just say what actually happened and let that be enough.
He didn't send it, in the end. Something told him this particular conversation deserved to happen in person rather than through a screen, where tone was too easy to misread and silences too easy to misinterpret in exactly the way that had already caused the problem in the first place.
He resolved, instead, to find her the next day, face to face, and actually say what he should have said days ago. It felt like a small decision, sitting there in his room turning it over one more time before finally falling asleep. But it didn't feel small. It felt, if anything, like the kind of decision that mattered a great deal more than its size suggested — another quiet step in a pattern he was only just beginning to fully understand, one honest conversation at a time.