Would he be at the wedding?
Just the chance that he would be there made her decision of whether or not she was going that much easier.
Poppy checked the time and stood up. If she hurried, she’d be able to catch Liam before he got off his shift. “Do you want anything from the first floor?”
The first floor had all the best vending machines on it, so anytime she or Carmen were headed down, they always offered to grab a snack.
“I’m good.” Carmen waved her off.
Poppy grabbed her phone and headed to the elevator bay. Since finding out she’d hit a dead-end when it came to her prognosis, she’d ventured out a total number of two times, and both had been, in a word, disastrous.
After her devastating appointment with Steph, she was holed up in a fortress of solitude constructed in her living room. At first, she’d tried to convince herself that it was healthy, that it was normal, that the entire world was in a protracted pandemic hangover, and that everyone she knew secretly craved nothing more than endless streaming television, ice cream for dinner, and not having to put on anything but the same two pairs of soft sweatpants in rotation. But the truth was, her diagnosis had carved a hole inside her, a hollow so large it echoed, and she’d been filling it with loneliness because that was preferable to the alternatives, pity, disappointment, or worse, the relentless, saccharine optimism of well-meaning friends and family.
Her first and only attempt to reach outside this bubble of self-preservation had been an unmitigated disaster. She’d signed up for an advanced vinyasa hip hop yoga class at a studio she’d never visited, believing that maybe, just maybe, a room full of zen moms and ambient 90s hip hop and R&B music would snap her out of her funk. She had not accounted for the owner, Tiana, announcing the theme “letting go of old identities” at the start of class, which triggered, without warning, the mother of all emotional breakdowns. She’d spent the next fifty-five minutes leaking tears from both eyes at a slow, steady trickle, desperately trying to convince herself (and everyone else) that it was just mascara run-off and not the physical manifestation of her internal collapse.
Miraculously, no one confronted her waterworks. It turned out that weeping in public was not the social death sentence she’d always believed it to be, if anything, it made her invisible. She’d expected to walk out of that studio drenched in shame, but instead, she was intercepted by Tiana, who radiated a glow so potent it felt photosynthetic. She didn’t ask Poppy what was wrong or why she’d come to class. She just said, “You should come to Girl’s Night tomorrow,” in a way that made it sound likea prescription rather than a suggestion, her voice as soothing as weighted blankets. With nothing left to lose, and partly because Tiana’s aura was so overwhelming it short-circuited her ability to refuse, Poppy agreed.
The next twenty-four hours were a looping highlight reel of “Should I or shouldn’t I,” but ultimately, she showed up at the aforementioned Girl’s Night at JT’s, where she was joined by Frankie and Jenna, who owned the beauty salon in Hope Falls, and they danced and drank for three hours straight. She didn’t belong, but she also didn’t not belong. For a fleeting moment, she allowed herself to believe that maybe this was what people meant when they talked about “community”—that you could be a stranger in a room and still be permitted to take up space.
At some point, she must have called Liam because he showed up and put her in an Uber. She didn’t even make it halfway before her stomach rebelled, and she projectile-vomited into the footwell of the four-door sedan, a new low she hadn’t anticipated. The driver, a man with a stoic mustache and a trunk full of industrial-strength air fresheners, assessed the situation with the kind of resigned disgust of someone who’d cleaned up after humans too many times. He charged her a two-hundred-dollar cleaning fee, plus a fifty-dollar tip she felt compelled to add out of pure mortification.
When she returned to her bungalow, she stripped off her stained clothes, tossed them directly in the trash, and stood under the shower until the water turned cold. Then she climbed into bed and didn’t get out for the rest of the weekend, not even to attend her niece Finley’s eighth birthday party, which under normal circumstances would have been the highlight of her month.
She’d gone out exactly zero times since the Uber incident. Her one-bedroom cottage had become a bunker, stocked with shelf-stable snacks andA Court of Thorns and Rosesbox set.She rationed human interaction the way some people rationed toilet paper. The only people she saw, outside of work, were her Instacart delivery guy and the neighbor’s cat, who had figured out how to let himself in through her screen door. Sometimes she wished she was the type of person who could lose herself in work, but the problem was, her job was a daily reminder of how fragile everything was. Every patient was a mirror, each with their own ticking clock.
Phoebe had been messaging every day for their raincheck coffee date, but she’d been avoiding that too. She just couldn’t face her, she couldn’t face any of them. It was bad enough they’d had the childhood she’d wanted, but now they also had her ideal, Cinderella glass shoe, fairytale happily-ever-afters too. It wasn’t their fault, and she loved her nieces and nephews more than life itself, but she just needed a little time to build up some emotional buffers around her broken heart.
When the elevator stopped, she got off and headed to the ER. When she arrived, she asked Zeta, the charge nurse, where Liam was, and she was told she’d just missed her brother, who had left the break room for the last time moments earlier.
Not wanting to miss him, she rushed to the double doors that led out to the waiting room and pressed her lanyard to the sensor. Once they opened, she saw a very familiar broad back and brown hair in the center of the sliding doors, one foot on the pavement outside.
“Liam!” She called out.
He paused, and for a moment, she thought he was going to continue walking, but then he turned.
She continued towards him, her momentum carrying her until she stopped about a foot and a half in front of him, what she saw shocked her. It took her by complete surprise. Her brother was standing in front of her, but it was a version of him she may not have ever seen before.
“You look almost…chipper. Happy. Relaxed. It’s like your walls are down, or at least a few windows to your soul are cracked. Your guard isn’t up. It’s like you don’t have one foot out the door. Which, I realize, is ironic since this is your last day and I stopped you literally when you had one foot out the door, but I don’t know, you just seem… open. Present.” Her eyes widened. “Who are you, and what have you done with my broody brother?”
He grinned. “It’s my last day.”
“Hmmm.” She wasn’t buying it. Something else was going on. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to decipher what was different about the man she considered one of her best friends.
“I need to go,” he stated, clearly losing patience with her secondhand existential crisis on his behalf.
“Right.” She shook off whatever had come over her and lifted her pointer finger in the air. “Just a quick question. What time are you picking me up?”
He stared down at her, his expression as blank as his memory of what she was referring to.
It clearly didn’t help when she asked, “Am I meeting you there?”
He blinked.
“Thewedding,” she emphasized.
“Oh, right.”
“Ahh!” She huffed in offense as her jaw dropped and smacked him on the arm. Hard. “You didn’t remember I was going?!”
