“A surprise,” he said, smiling a little. “Nothing fancy.”
For a second she forgot her pain. She saw the man she’d fallen in love with. The man who took her on dates. The man from their first apartment—the one who’d laughed with her over cheap pizza and helped her paint the bedroom yellow.
Her resolve wavered.
“Fine.” She opened the door wider, letting him in. “Give me five minutes.”
She left him standing in the doorway and hurried down the hall. She caught her reflection in the mirror and forced a steadier breath. No makeup, hair barely brushed. This wasn’t a date.
When she returned downstairs, Tom was in the kitchen. Doing her breakfast dishes.
The sight of him there—sleeves rolled, hands wet—was absurdly domestic. It shouldn’t have felt tender.
She grabbed her coat from the hook. She couldn’t forget that her marriage was built on nothing. That it was doomed from the start. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
He reached past her, his arm brushing her sleeve, close enough that she felt the heat of him, and pulled her scarf from the hook.
He wrapped it carefully around her neck.
This was the same man who thought her joy was childish. Who’d called the parts of her she treasured “cringe.” The softness didn’t erase the truth.
They stepped outside into the sting of winter. The world was quiet, the street muffled under layers of gray snow. Christmas lights still clung stubbornly to a few porches, glowing faintly in the pale morning.
Tom opened the passenger door for her, waiting until she was settled before circling to his side. Through the glass she watched his breath fog in the air.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he started the car.
“Somewhere I used to take you,” he said. “A long time ago.”
The engine hummed, the heater kicking in. They drove through the waking city—past houses that still bore traces of the holidays, past salt-streaked cars and shoveled sidewalks.
Lauren leaned her head against the window, trying not to think about how natural this felt. How dangerously easy it was to slip back into the rhythm ofthem.
“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” she admitted quietly, watching the landscape blur past.
Tom glanced at her, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I’m glad you did.”
Lauren staredat the building in front of them.
The laundromat.
Theirlaundromat. The coin-op on the corner where they'd spent every Sunday morning for two years, hauling bags of dirty clothes because their first apartment didn't have a washer or dryer.
"Tom." Her voice came out strange. "What are we doing here?"
He was already out of the car, popping the trunk. When she climbed out, the cold hit her face, but she barely felt it.
Tom pulled out his duffel—the same one she’d packed for him, she realized.
The laundromat door stood in front of them, frosted glass with faded lettering. Through it, she could see the same rows of machines, the same flickering fluorescent lights.
"I thought we could do laundry," he said. "Like we used to."
Her breath caught. "You drove across town to do laundry at a coin-op?"
"Yeah." He shouldered the bag.
Inside, the smell hit her first—detergent and dryer sheets and that particular industrial warmth that laundromats had. The machines hummed and clanked, a Sunday morning symphony she'd forgotten.
