It feels like something I get to choose.
Twenty-One
Danae
One month later, I’m standing in the middle of a living room that smells like fresh paint and cardboard and new beginnings, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
Boxes are everywhere—stacked like uneven towers, labeled in black marker with words that feel too small for what they contain.
KITCHEN. PAPA’S ROOM. BATHROOM. MY CLOTHES. /BOOKS.
My whole life has been reduced to ink and tape and the sound of packing paper crinkling under my fingers.
Outside, I can hear Miles’ bike in the driveway cooling down, the ticking of metal settling after a ride. The late afternoon sun pours through tall windows I’m still not used to. They are bigger than any window in my Arkansas house, bigger than the one above Papa’s hospital bed where he used to watch the neighbor kids ride their bikes past.
This place is different.
Not just the state. Not just the air that smells like pine and something faintly salty when the wind turns.
Different like the world somehow widened.
I stand there, barefoot on hardwood floors that don’t creak yet, and I stare at the staircase like it might ask me who I think I am walking into a home like this.
Miles’ home.
No.
Our home.
The words make my throat tighten.
I still keep expecting the universe to shove me back, to remind me I don’t get things this easy.
But Miles he keeps rearranging the world like ease is something he can buy and hand to me with both hands.
I bend and slice open another box with the little pocket knife Josie insisted I pack in my purse—for the boxes on the first night, just get into the ones important she’d said, like she knew there would be a first night and a second and a hundred more.
Inside is a stack of framed photos, wrapped in towels.
Papa’s picture of Nanny is on top, the one in the oval frame that always sat on his side table. I hold it carefully, like it’s fragile, like it’s an heirloom of breath and memory.
I set it on the mantle.
And my chest aches.
Because a month ago, I was sitting on a tarp-covered bedroom floor with blood on my gloves and guns in the hallway. A month ago, I didn’t know if I’d ever see Papa’s face again.
A month ago, my world was a tight circle—work, home, his medications, his meals, his oxygen, my exhaustion.
Now I’m in a house with high ceilings and an in-law suite and a man who looks at me like I’m not just someone he wants in his bed. Like I’m someone he wants in his life. A life he wants to build alongside me not around me.
I hear footsteps behind me—heavy, familiar, purposeful. Miles comes into the living room carrying a box like it weighs nothing. His cut isn’t on today. Just a fitted T-shirt that clings to his shoulders, jeans that sit low on his hips, and that expression he gets when he’s quietly pleased.
He sets the box down and walks straight to me, stopping close enough that I can smell him—soap, leather, and something uniquely Miles that I can’t name.
“Whatcha staring at, baby?” he asks, voice low like he’s trying not to spook me.
I blink and realize I’ve been frozen again. “This,” I admit, gesturing vaguely at everything. “All of it. I don’t, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
