Riley was standing in the doorway to my office, his fly unzipped and a coffee stain resembling Argentina down his leg.
“RISD. Put your dick away.”
I was in rough shape after giving Tiel six days of ‘space’ and let’s be honest: she hadn’t been asking for a couple days of space. She never wanted to see me again.
I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t convince myself to eat much. I was hitting the treadmill in the dead of night, running for hours and pretending there was something normal about that.
“My bad, my bad,” he mumbled as he righted his trousers. “As I was saying, are you coming?”
Irritated, I scrolled through my calendar but couldn’t find an appointment. “Coming where? I’m free all morning, and I was looking forward to feeling sorry for myself during that time.”
That last comment earned me a lifted eyebrow from Riley. He was squarely in the camp of me calling Tiel and groveling my ass off. I was more interested in hating the world for the foreseeable future and not making a fool of myself again. “It’s the walk-through at Wellesley. Shannon said you wanted to be there.”
Fuuuuck.
“Shannon, Patrick, and Andy are meeting us there. Matt’s driving. You can come with us, or I can catch a ride with him if you’re out.”
“No,” I groaned, and shoved my things into my messenger bag. “I’m not in the mood to talk to Shannon, and she’s going to come in here, guns blazing, if I bail. I don’t have the patience for her dramatics today.”
I slumped in the back seat of Matt’s car—an exact replica of mine—and ignored the conversation he carried on with Riley about basketball. The traffic was heavy this morning, and after another endless night spent jogging on a road to nowhere, I fell asleep as soon as we hit Storrow Drive.
The crunch of gravel under tires woke me, and as I set eyes on the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old Arts and Crafts mansion for the first time in years, I knew I should have stayed at the office. There were only so many hits a man could take.
Cold lead sank in my stomach but I followed Matt and Riley up the circular drive. They were pointing out the work in progress, but I couldn’t hear them over the pounding in my head.
We joined the group in the kitchen, and Shannon wasted no time offering her commentary. “I didn’t believe you’d actually show up. Let’s commemorate this moment,” she said, gesturing toward me. “I’d suggest a selfie but you look like shit.”
“Play nice, Shan,” Riley warned. They made eye contact, but I was too miserable to care about their exchange of grimaces and eyebrows and stares.
“Right, so . . . let’s get back to the agenda,” Andy said.
While I should have been listening to the updates and dilemmas, I started wandering through the rooms. It looked different with protective tarps on the floors, and scaffolding and construction equipment everywhere. Almost sterile. With all the furniture and home goods removed, it was the same as any other jobsite.
Just about.
There were some memories that lingered even when everything else was gone.
The small linen closet beside the window seat where I’d hidden whenever Angus was on a bender and looking to unleash some rage.
The back staircase he threw Erin down when she was thirteen, breaking her arm in three places.
The alcove in Shannon’s room where I’d camped when it was too scary to sleep alone.
The room where my mother died.
And because my brain enjoyed fucking with me, I found myself in the middle of the nursery, thinking about the child Tiel and I weren’t expecting.
Of course she wasn’t pregnant. It was my fault, that much I knew. I wasn’t putting a baby in her any more than I was proving string theory. Either my sperm didn’t swim or the ones that did were dysfunctional, or the universe knew I was too fucked up to reproduce.
Or maybe—probably—Angus was right all along. I was a mistake, an accident, a fucking mulligan. I shouldn’t have been born, and the only course correction was ensuring my genetic material never poisoned another generation.
He was right, and so was Tiel. I couldn’t fool anyone into thinking I was capable of keeping anything good.
There wasn’t a single moment of my life that wasn’t a fucking disaster. As an adult, I knew how to cover it up with trendy clothes and professional expertise, but when those pieces were stripped away, I was still the excessively anxious kid who couldn’t go anywhere without a crate of prescriptions and medical supplies. I was wildly risk averse—I stuck to my playbook and kept everyone at a safe distance—and for years, I had been just fine.
Tiel was perhaps my one uncalculated risk. Those girls—the ones at the bars? There was no risk there. I had enough emotional distance and condoms to guarantee it.
She was a gamble. A noisy, colorful, gorgeous gamble, and it was clear that I lost.
