There was a pause, then: “Okay. But you can't avoid it forever.”
“I'm not avoiding it. I'm prioritizing.”
“That's what avoiding looks like.”
Maggie sighed and looked back at the phone, where Beth and Emily were watching with twin expressions of concern.
“Dad's stuff,” Beth said quietly. “That's going to be hard.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to go through it?”
“I have to. Eventually. Just...not yet. Not today.”
On the screen, Emily's face was thoughtful. “What happens to the things of someone who...who wasn't who you thought they were? How do you decide what to keep?”
It was such an Emily question, direct, unflinching, getting right to the heart of what everyone else was dancing around. Maggie found she appreciated it.
“I don't know,” she admitted. “I haven't figured that out yet. He was their father. He was a good father, in many ways, for many years. The things in that box are probably from before, before everything fell apart. But they're still his things. And touching them means touching all of it. The good parts and the bad parts.”
“I understand,” Emily said. “I have things from my mother's house that remind me of the times she pretended I didn't exist. I keep them anyway. Because they're part of my story, even the parts I don't like.”
Beth reached over and squeezed Emily's hand, and on the tiny phone screen, Maggie watched them with a full heart.
“Today is about the good memories. The rest can wait.”
She set the phone back on its perch and returned to the boxes, to the old report cards and baby teeth and soccer trophies, to the tangible evidence of the family she had built and the life she had lived.
Tomorrow, she would deal with the harder things.
CHAPTER 22
Maggie woke before dawn.
For a moment, she didn't know where she was. The ceiling was wrong, the light was wrong, the sounds were wrong. Then memory flooded back: the Andover house. She was sleeping in her old bedroom, hers and Daniel's, for the first time in years.
Grandma Sarah was in the guest room even though she insisted that the bed in the RV was more comfortable.
Lauren and Sarah shared Lauren's old room, bickering about who got which twin bed just like they had when they were children. Christopher and Becca had their room down the hall, Eloise asleep in her crib. Chelsea had taken Sarah's old room.
Maggie stared at the ceiling and willed herself to forget the last time she’d slept in this bed. It didn’t take long before she had to get up.
I can’t stay in this bed any longer.
She slipped out from under the covers, pulled on the cardigan she had draped over the chair, put her slippers on and padded into the hallway. The house was silent except for the settling sounds that old houses make, creaks and groans, the whisper ofair through gaps in windows, the quiet breathing of a structure that had stood for seventy years and would stand for seventy more.
The hallway was dark, but Maggie didn't need light. She had walked this hallway thousands of times, in daylight and darkness, carrying babies and groceries and laundry and all the accumulated weight of a life. Her feet knew every floorboard, every spot that creaked, every place to step to move in silence.
She paused at Christopher and Becca’s door, slightly ajar. Inside, she could hear the soft sounds of sleep, Becca's steady breathing, the occasional snuffle from Eloise's crib. Her son had grown up in this room. He had plastered the walls with posters of baseball players and rock bands. He had done his homework at the desk by the window, had snuck out the window once to meet friends and thought she didn't know, had packed his bags for basic training in this room and left as a boy and come back as a man with a piece of himself missing.
She moved on.
Lauren's room was next, and she could hear her daughters' voices through the door, low murmurs, the occasional giggle. They were awake too, apparently, unable to sleep in their childhood beds without reverting to childhood habits. How many nights had Maggie stood in this exact spot, listening to them whisper and laugh, knowing she should tell them to go to sleep but loving the sound of their closeness too much to interrupt?
Sarah's room, where Chelsea slept now. Beth's room, now a guest room, where Grandma Sarah slept, seemed to wait for its owner to return for the final goodbye. The bathroom where she had bandaged countless scraped knees and wiped countless tears and taught five children how to brush their teeth.
And at the end of the hall, the narrow door to the attic, where so much of their past waited to be sorted and claimed or released.
