CHAPTER 12: MATT
Icleaned the bathroom twice.
The first time, I scrubbed the tile until my knuckles were raw, got into the grout with a toothbrush the way Elena always said you were supposed to. Wiped down the mirror until there wasn't a single streak, organized the cabinet with her moisturizer on the left and my shaving cream on the right, exactly the way it had always been. Then I stood back and looked at it and decided it wasn't good enough, so I did it again.
That's how it had been for three days now. I'd washed sheets that were already clean, vacuumed carpets that didn't need vacuuming, reorganized the pantry twice. I'd cleaned the baseboards at two in the morning, down on my hands and knees with a damp rag, discovering corners of this house I'd never noticed in eight years of living here.
Sergeant Donovan had called it admin leave. "Take some time, get your head on straight, come back when you're ready." He'd looked at my face when he said it, taking in the bruises fading to yellow-green and the split lip still scabbed over… and hadn't asked what happened. Cops don't ask, they just know.
So I had time. Too much of it, the hours stretching out empty and endless. I’d gone quiet on everyone, even Angela. EspeciallyAngela. Whatever mess she was dealing with was hers now. I didn’t have room for it.
But the long hours still felt like torture, and if I didn't fill them with something I was going to crawl out of my own skin.
I'd gone to the grocery store that morning and stood in the floral section for twenty minutes, trying to remember which flowers Elena liked. Tulips? Daisies? I used to know this. I used to know everything about her, from her favorite song to the way she took her coffee. Now I stood there like a stranger trying to guess at a woman I'd been married to for eight years.
I bought yellow tulips, then put them in a vase on the kitchen table where she'd see them when she came home.
When she came home: that was the lie I kept telling myself. Elena just needed time, space, a few days to cool off and remember what we had. And when she walked back through that door, the house would be ready. Clean and bright and waiting for her. She'd see that I could change, that I could be better, that I could be the man she'd thought she married.
I wiped down the kitchen counter for the third time that day and tried not to think about how pathetic that sounded, even inside my own head.
My phone sat on the counter where I'd left it. I picked it up, checked the screen even though I knew what I'd find.
Nothing.
I'd texted her again that morning.
I'm here when you're ready to talk.
Before that, something even simpler.
I miss you.
The day before, something longer that I'd deleted and rewritten four times before sending. All of them swallowed upby the same silence, like dropping stones into a well so deep you never hear them hit bottom.
I set the phone down and looked around the kitchen. At the gleaming counters, the spotless floors, the yellow tulips slowly wilting in their vase. All the little ways I'd tried to make this house into something she'd want to come back to.
Except, the truth was she wasn't coming back to this house.
She wasn't coming back to me.
If I wanted to see her, if I wantedanychance at all, I had to go to her.
I stood there for a long moment, hands braced against the counter, staring at the tulips. Then I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door and walked out to my car.
The signfor Millbrook came up just after six, the sun getting low and gold behind the trees.
Population 4,200.
Same faded green sign that had been there since I was a kid, same white letters going gray at the edges. I'd driven past this sign a thousand times on the way to school, to football games, to Elena's house when we were seventeen and I'd borrow my dad's truck just to see her for an hour before curfew.
The town hadn't changed much, but towns like this never do. The feed store was still on the corner of Main and Hadley, same hand-painted sign out front. The diner where we used to split milkshakes after Friday night games still had the same red awning, a little more faded now. The church where Elena'smom's funeral had been, where half the town had shown up in black and nobody knew what to say.
I passed the turnoff for the reservoir. Couldn't help but look.
We used to park out there, Elena and me. Summers, mostly, when the heat was too thick to do anything but lie in the bed of the truck and watch the stars come out. I'd bring a blanket and a six-pack of whatever I could sneak from my dad's fridge, and she'd bring herself, which was all I ever wanted anyway.
"I'm gonna marry you someday," I'd told her once. Seventeen years old, drunk on cheap beer and the smell of her shampoo. "I mean it. You're it for me."
