There is a pause long enough for me to hear my pulse auditioning for a new frequency.
Unknown:Ask and I’ll come. Don’t and I’ll haunt. Those are the only two things I know how to do with you.
A laugh breaks out of me so fast I cover my mouth like I sneezed. It’s not happiness. It’s recognition. It’s the relief of a script handed to an actress who thought the play had been cancelled.
Me:What if I ask you to haunt?
Unknown:Then I’ll be the gentleman you don’t trust and the monster you do.
I should end it there. I should roll my chair back and open the volunteer schedule and color-code it until my eyes sting. Instead I type the word I swore I wouldn’t say today.
Me:When?
The answer is a calendar alert pretending to be a joke.
Unknown:After the party. After strawberries. When you can no longer pretend it’s not what you wanted when you wrote your name at the top of your own night.
My hands go cold, which is what they do when my body diverts power to my heart. I slide the cards out from under the blotter and read them again. Knives and instructions. Loss and choice. I press them flat like maps and imagine the route.
The sky outside the office window goes lavender, then bruised, then the kind of blue I’m wearing. The lights on the garlands click on, their tiny flicker making everything look gentler than it is. I gather donor packets. I add place cards. I pretend it’s all normal until normal threatens to crack, and then I let it.
On my way out, I pass the west hallway. It’s empty. It looks like it always has. The ballast still needs replacing. The air still smells like rubber and ice and the kind of electricity you can taste on your tongue when the weather shifts. I stand at the mouth of it for one extra second. Then I keep walking because I know when to stop praying to the altars I built myself.
The parking lot is a sheet of glass pretending to be asphalt. I walk carefully, as if being careful is a thing I have practiced. My phone buzzes just before I reach the car.
Unknown:Sleep, Samantha.
I type back, delete and type again.
Me:You, too.
Unknown:I don’t. But I’ll try.
Me:Why can’t you?
A pause. Longer this time. I open the car, slide in, turn the heater, let the windshield fog. The text arrives when the world is blurred into softness.
Unknown:Because I keep seeing you at the end of a hallway you shouldn’t have walked down and wondering how I’m going to be the kind of man who deserves to wait there.
I put my forehead on the steering wheel and let myself smile the kind of smile that would worry my father and make my brother call me an idiot and maybe, just maybe, save me from becoming mean to my own hope.
The ribbon on my wrist leaves an imprint when I take it off. The line it draws across my skin fades, slowly, lazily, like a tide shrugging its shoulders. I trace it with my thumb and promise myself I won’t drown if I know which way the water moves.
At home, I set the cards beside the ribbon and stand there longer than I should, listening to the house breathe, listening to my own repairs working in the dark. I shower with the lights off and the door cracked, steam licking up the mirror like a secret trying to climb. In bed, I don’t check my phone again. I turned the volume on low and let the possibility of sound be the lullaby.
The last thought I have before I sleep is stupid, pure and damning.
Don’t wear red today,he wrote. And I didn’t. But I’m going to wear something he’ll notice, pretending I did it for me. I’m going to learn the difference the only way a woman learns it—by living through the night she decided to be honest with herself.
December hums in my bones. The rink waits. The gala draws near like a train you hear long before you see it. In nine days there will be strawberries. In less than that, there will be instructions. In the morning, there will be coffee and a father who loves me the way men who survived loss learn to love—fiercely, gracelessly, loudly. And somewhere between now and all of it, there will be a hallway that isn’t a hallway, a man who refuses to hide that he doesn’t knowhow to hide, and a blue ribbon that keeps slipping when I tighten it, like it belongs more to motion than to knots.
I fall asleep smiling at my own foolishness, and when I dream, I dream of walking down that strip of rubber toward something that does not own me but insists I own the wanting.
Chapter Three
Sammie
December has a way of carving the day into clean little blocks you can stack neatly and lie to yourself about. Morning: emails, vendor calls, checklists. Afternoon: skate drive, donor follow-ups, press release edits. Evening: rinse, repeat, breathe, pretend. But obsession is a spill, and it runs into every block no matter how tall you try to build.
