The kitchen flared to life with clean lines and warm colors, and I sat Phoebe on the floor in her bed while I walked back to the Tahoe for the rest of our things. Once I got everything for her situated, I opened the fridge to grab a beer.
Wait. The fridge? The appliances?
Everything was not only back in its place, but my fridge was stocked. Not with anything extremely perishable, but I had beer, bread, cheese, jelly, and other essentials. If I weren’t feeling so shitty, I’d be excited I could hold off on shopping. Grabbing a beer, I took a long pull and scooped up Phoebe as I walked into the living room. Aside from a plastic tarp by the front door with some tools laying on it, everything looked finished.
I did a three-sixty, walking down the hall, through the dining room, past the half bath. “This is the kind of place a family deserves to live in,” I said to Phoebe, stopping in my tracks when I got to the far back room my dad had kept as an office.
I always thought this room would look great with built-in bookshelves and floor-to-ceiling windows, and fuck if the construction crew didn’t deliver.
“She would love this room, Phoebe. I could see her sitting on the bench underneath that big window reading. Couldn’t you?”
My shoulders fell as I backed out of the room and turned off the light, shutting the door with a click and walking back down the hall. I put Phoebe in her cat bed on the kitchen floor and pulled out a barstool on the far side of the island, looking around the space. Jenna should be here, laughing at me as I pulled her through the house, pointing out all the things I changed and all the things that stayed the same. She should be here, drinking with me, smiling with me, just with me.
If there ever was a person I’d break my rule with, it’d be you, Jenna, but I can’t.
Alone in my space, the words felt like an excuse, a copout, a reason to hide behind my fears.
I pulled my beer closer and finished it in one swallow, remembering a night not long after I joined the force when we took a buddy out to celebrate his return to duty. He was shot during a routine traffic stop, and that night he got trashed and confessed he walked in on his wife cheating on him the week prior. It turned out, the shooting fucked her up pretty badly, and her way of dealing with it was to stop caring about him. When he confronted her, she told him point-blank, you couldn’t get hurt if you stopped loving someone.
I’d forgotten about that. He was shot less than a month after I joined.
How did Jenna deal with death and sickness every day? She didn’t choose to stop practicing when her first patient died. She loved her job and wouldn’t stop on days she came home in tears. Was I making the easy choice all this time because I was scared of giving my heart to someone? Was I that emotionally stupid it took losing Jenna to make me see everything clearly?
There was nothing good about what was happening. My choice for staying single was imploding around me because I was finally fucking realizing I wanted to share this big, empty house with someone.
I wanted to share my big empty life with someone.
With Jenna.
The emptiness was spreading through my body like I submerged it in ice-cold water, but for once, in my solitary existence, I let everything hit me head-on instead of exploding in anger or pushing things below the surface.
I let the harshness of Jenna’s words tonight flow through me, absorbing how I’d hurt and used her. How I’d treated her, asked so much of her, and given nothing in return.
I hung my head and closed my eyes as another wave crashed into my body like a Tsunami. It was what was threatening to crack my chest in two. What this was, what this had always been, was deeper than trust, deeper than desire.
Connection.
The basic recognition of finding someone in the billions of people on this planet that truly made you a better person. The person you were willing to change for—the person who was worth it.
Do what you do best. Fucking leave, Mark.
And I did.
24 - JENNA
“It’s easy to see why this shelter has the highest adoption rate in all of North Carolina,” I said, taking in the five-thousand-foot facility Kelli Jacoby, the owner, and Executive Director, was showing me.
The last time I was here, I didn’t get the entire tour, and it was even more impressive than I remembered. She beamed at the praise and tossed her honey-colored hair over her shoulder, motioning me to follow her into the back offices.
Kelli and her husband, Ralph, had been philanthropists their entire life, having a particular passion for helping animals. She was in her late forties and dressed impeccably in a pair of white designer pants and a green button-down blouse. Casual sneakers completed the look, and I couldn’t help but notice both the knees of her pants were dirty, suggesting she didn’t have a problem jumping in to help when needed.
They spent a fortune renovating an old warehouse and turning it into an animal shelter and a state-of-the-art surgery facility. They focused on rehabilitating animals and finding the best adoption matches. Volunteers and employees darted around the bright, open area. They walked dogs, cleaned spaces, and showed families different animals.
I stopped and watched a young kid sitting in the corner of a large kennel. He was probably in college, and he had a textbook open on his lap. In the opposite corner was a skinny black dog, hunched over with his tail between his legs. The food and water dish were beside the dog, but he wouldn’t move. Every time the boy turned a page in the book, the dog jerked and moved closer to the corner. The boy noticed and stopped, putting both hands on his lap. The dog stared and inched closer to the food with the boy, completely ignoring him.
“That’s our goal,” Kelli said, crossing her arms.
As much as I was taking in every detail of the day-to-day operations, she was watching me just as closely. “You can’t put a dog like that in a tiny cage and then wonder why no one wants it. It took Tom a week before Oliver would let him in the kennel. Now, look at them. Oliver is going to be someone’s best friend one day.”
