“They weren't giving me mixed signals. I was mixing their attention with my hope.”

I kept calling it confusion because that was easier than admitting the pattern was fairly consistent. They showed up when it suited them and went quiet when it didn't, and I treated every return as new information rather than the same information arriving again.

What was mixed was never the signal. It was what I did with it: I took the warm half as evidence and filed the cold half under bad timing. Read together they were not contradictory at all. They were just not saying what I wanted them to say.