“How many therapists you got?” he asked.
“Just the one.”
“Add a second and maybe we can talk,” he murmured. He rested a hand on the small of her back, pushing her forward as the light shifted green.
“Milo?” she asked, watching Sara stare over her shoulder from half a block over.
“Arizona?”
“Friends with benefits?—”
“You’re not ready for that,” Milo cut her off abruptly. “That’s triple therapist territory.”
Milo stuffed his hands in his pockets, bumping into her shoulder.
A strawberry-red blush crept over her neck. “Why do I feel like you’re either going to be my best friend or the worst thing that’s ever happened to me?”
He sucked a breath through his teeth.
“Only time will tell, huh?”
SEVEN
There is a scent to grief.
It’s sterile, like a spilled bottle of nail polish remover on the kitchen table while waiting for a call from the doctor, or a whiff of hand sanitizer between gloves and morphine doses.
It lingers. You go blind to it in your own home, but suddenly, out in the world, it finds you, and the inside of your nostrils flare. The headache sets in.
Hanna woke to the sharp clinical fragrance of grief before she even opened her eyes on the June morning she’d been dreading for exactly one year. It had crawled toward her, hour by hour, the slow sting of scores kept invading her lower back and inching up her spine. It whispered, Can you believe it? One whole year without her? Can you?
She could not.
It had been a month since she’d escaped the onset of a Phoenix summer. Between all of the morning walks and lunch breaks and movie nights with the group—Sara, Matty, and more often than not, Milo and Chloe—she'd managed to condense the dread into small doses.
But she could not avoid it entirely.
Below her room, Sara clinked around in the kitchen before work, making her breakfast smoothie. Matty had surely already made his way out the door to the office. Hanna figured she only had to lay there for another twenty minutes—child's play—to successfully avoid Sara as well.
The thought of making eye contact with anyone who knew why she could hardly breathe sickened her.
She checked her phone, immediately regretting it.
People meant well, but that didn’t make their messages any less overwhelming. She ignored ninety percent of them, but did choose to open an email from her boss who had kindly given her an out from work for the day. A novel from DO NOT ANSWER rolled in, and she was tempted to throw her phone into the Bay and never check it again. She settled for simply turning it off.
An hour later, Hanna had finally convinced herself to get out of bed, and dragged leggings, a pair of good walking shoes, and a flannel that did not belong to her over her slumped frame.
A walk could do wonders.
She forced herself not to look up at Milo’s balcony as she passed below and ducked into the cafe where she’d spent every morning her first week in town. She slipped into a booth, staring out the window along 8th Street until an empty mug landed in front of her.
“You’re late today,” the server said.
“Slept in,” Hanna mumbled.
“No work?”
“No,” Hanna said. She forced a smile. “Not today.”
