But at least it’s not closed anymore.
“Dude,” I say with a laugh, shoving aside the shower curtain to look at the cat yowling at me from the safe distance of the under-sink rug. “You are being so fucking loud. I’ll be done in a second.”
God forbid I’m two minutes late with his dinner.
Another loud yowl flies out of him, and I laugh with a shake of my head as I try to rinse the suds from my hair.
“The more you talk, the longer it takes me,” I tell him.
He lets out an aggravated meow, and I poke my head out of the curtain again to see him spin in a circle and drop onto the rug in a huff.
I hurry to finish my shower at the demand of the small, naked cat, and after throwing on some clean clothes, the two of us head down to the kitchen so his majesty can be fed before he withers away to nothing but bone.
I find myself staring into the fridge while he eats, and the sound of the garage opening fills the house while I pull out some chicken breasts and vegetables to throw together.
“The garage is so clean,” Jules comments as she pushes open the door. “You must have been out there for forever.” She crosses the room to reach me, dropping a hand at my back to peck me on the cheek. “I’m gonna go change and then I can help chop the veggies.”
“Jules—” I stammer as she makes her way toward the stairs, quickly grabbing a towel to brush off my hands as she climbs up. “Wait. Let me—”
I toss the towel onto the counter before following after her. When I round the corner to our stairwell, she’s standing frozen at the top of it, using a thumb to point down the hallway.
“You cleaned out the nursery,” she says quietly.
“Yeah,” I nod, doubt suddenly swirling in the pit of my stomach. “Maybe I should have talked to you about it first. I just thought…”
I sigh, scrubbing a hand along my forehead.
The tremor in her jaw and the tightness of her chest are visible from here, and I want to fucking kick myself. I should have asked her. I shouldn’t have assumed.
Carefully trekking down the stairs to close the distance between us, her arms snake around my middle and she tucks her face into my chest with a heavy exhale.
“Thank you.” She sniffs, and I wrap my arms around her shoulders, resting my chin on the top of her head. “I’ve been telling myself for a year that I’d go in there and do it, but I couldn’t.”
My hand moves to rub along her back, the other tightening its hold on her.
“You could have asked me,” I tell her. “I would have done that for you.”
Her head shakes against my chest as she pulls in another sniff, and when she looks up at me, her brows dip.
“You had to build all of his furniture, and then you had to take it all apart,” she argues. “It wouldn’t have been fair to ask that of you.”
“Jules, you—”
I bite my tongue, wrapping my arms more tightly around her instead of reminding her of the cruelty and unfairness that washanded toher.My lips press against the top of her head, resting there.
“We both needed it,” I tell her.
The tears that soak through my shirt while I hold her in my arms are a purge.
After the first few weeks, unless there’s was a doctor’s appointment or Brody was calling to check in on us after he’d reluctantly flown back home, we didn’t acknowledge it. I gave each of us a tattoo, my brother took some of the ashes and sent us keepsakes; a pendant and a necklace, and we pretended that the pain wasn’t there.
We pretended that a fault line hadn’t opened up between us and that it hadn’t turned into a chasm.
We held onto whatever we could to keep ourselves from drowning in it, and we closed the door and locked everything else behind it.
That room served a lot of purpose in its first year. It served as a reminder that, even though we didn’t tell anyone about him, he still existed. Like the pendant that I keep on my bike and the gem around Jules’s neck, it served as a vessel for our grief; something tangible.
And then I think it became a poison.
