Maybe that's the point.
Maybe it always was.
After they leave, the room trembles for a second like it's trying to shake their scent out of itself. It can't. Smoke and vanilla sit heavy over the floor like fog.
I stay in the chair because my legs don't remember how to be legs yet. The word please is still lodged between my ribs, useless now that there's no one here to hear it.
My ears ring with the end of my own voice.
I didn't know I could make that sound.
The silence after hurts worse.
I can still see it when I blink: Drake's hands moving in careful, useless motions; Marie's cheek pressed into my pillow, her eyes on me; Ragon's wrist dragging along my blankets, deliberate, methodical.
My palms sting. I realize I've been digging my nails into them hard enough to leave shy little half-moons.
"Breathe," I tell myself. Air goes in. Air comes out. It doesn't change the way my chest feels like someone reached in and twisted.
The nest sits in the middle of the floor where I left it last night when I still thought the worst thing that could happen was an awkward conversation.
It looks the same from a distance.
Up close it's wrong.
Not just the smells. The shape.
The weight is different. The way the middle slumps like someone bigger pressed it into a new idea about what softness is.
I stand up because I can't sit anymore. I take one step, then another, like I'm walking into a room where something died.
I stop at the edge.
I've done this a hundred times—stood here and looked down and felt the bone-deepyesthat nests make in my chest.
There is no yes now.
There is only a buzzing that sounds like DMV lighting when you've been there too long.
A hair glints on the pillowcase. Dark. Not mine. Not Eli's. I want to pluck it off and I want to set the entire house on fire and I want to lie down and go to sleep for a week and I want to never close my eyes again.
I don't touch the hair.
I back away.
The closet is exactly where it always is. So is the bag of spare bedding. I open the door and stare at the shelves, at the tidy stacks that used to feel like a promise.
The plastic crunches under my fingers when I pull a roll of garbage bags from the bottom. Heavy-duty. For garden clippings and holiday decorations. I tear one free. The bag unfurls with a sound like paper being torn in slow motion.
When I turn around, the nest is still wrong.
"Okay," I say out loud. "Okay."
I kneel at the edge. My knees hit the floor in the grooves my knees know. My stomach rolls.
I gather the top blanket—the one with weight that used to quiet my brain. It has drape to it, heft. My hands don't want to pick it up.
I pick it up anyway.
