Move halfway across the state andstillmanage to be an afterthought.
I pull the fleece tighter around myself, eyes burning. I don't know why I'm letting myself freak out about this. I’m not even bad at living with people. I lived with Sasha for two years; and yeah, our fridge was a war zone and she never remembered to buy toilet paper, but we made it work. More than that, even, since I got a friend out of it.
I can share space. I can be flexible. I can cohabitate like a damn pro.
I just… didn’t expect this.
But the blanket is warm, the couch has a dent in just the right place, and for the first time in days, if not weeks, I’m not running, not apologizing, and not performing CPR on the crumbling architecture of my life using caffeine, overwork, and omega coping mechanisms.
So. I tell myself I’ll close my eyes for a minute.
Just one minute.
(I don’t even make it to ten seconds.)
Chapter Six
Beau
The porch light is on.
I see it the second I pull in, and it can only mean one thing:
She’s here.
The truck idles under me, the engine ticking. I stay in the driver’s seat longer than I need to, hands still on the wheel and eyes locked on the house through a crust of frost and snow. Warm light glows behind the curtains, all soft, inviting—
And completely out of place.
This place used to be my aunt’s, before she passed away. She died fast—the kind of fast that doesn’t give you time to brace or bargain. There was no warning shot or gradual decline. It felt like one minute she was standing in the doorway with a tin of muffins and a lecture about taking care of myself, the next she was a name on a chart with the kind of diagnosis that takes the ground out from under you.
I didn’t get the chance to sit beside her and memorize the shape of her laugh before it dimmed, because she didn’t fade. Instead, she dropped out of our lives like a light switch being flicked off.
Here, then gone.
It was brutal, but in a way, it was clean; a sharp, deep cut that bled out quickly. Painful as hell, especially for my mom, but simple in its cruelty.
After that, this house sat quiet in a way that felt wrong and still in a way that lingered on your skin. My mom kept saying she’d sort through her sister’s things, but it always got put off. It was alwaysafter. After the holidays, after the snow melted, after the next round of appointments…
And every time she tried, she stalled in the doorway, staring at the floorboards like they’d swallow her whole if she actually stepped further inside.
The air felt heavier here. After all, grief has this sort of gravity that you can feel in your lungs.
My dad didn’t help. He didn’t soften at all, didn’t so much as lift a fucking finger. Instead of even offering to help, he just spent his time muttering about wasted space and wasted money and left my mom alone with every echo that hurt her, acting likehewas the one getting screwed by the world.
Then my mom got sick, too.
Her sickness wasn’t the fast or the clean kind, though. Hers was the slow kind—the kind that creeps in sideways and hides at first, slipping into the cracks of a life you thought you had time to prepare for.
It started with missed appointments and repeated questions: little things that didn’t seem like much on their own, until they weren’t little.
Until the pattern was something you couldn’t ignore no matter how hard you tried.
I was the one that stepped up. I took her to her appointments and sat with her as doctors ran through tests and arranged scans. It wasn’t long after that the words that felt like a punch and a verdict at the same time came: the conclusion of her having a disease that was, ultimately, a thief; and one that worked in pieces.
A fingertip at a time. A memory, a morning routine, a name. She was still here, still breathing and smiling and laughing—
And also, stillfading.
