Iplanned this like a surgery. I stayed at my brother’s for a week, long enough to breathe and stop second-guessing myself, before deciding it was time to come back. I drove myself over, knowing Griff and Knox were meeting me there later. I picked a day when the house was supposed to be empty—when he should’ve been on the field with the team, whistle around his neck, doing what he does best.
I told myself that it would be easier if I did this on my own. It isn’t. Emma offered to help but I lied and told her Griff was helping since I was staying at his place.
Kneeling in front of the last built-in shelf in the living room, a roll of tape by my knee, a half-filled box open in front of me. The room smells like cardboard and that faint dust you only notice when things are coming apart, the kind of stale quiet that settles in places that stopped feeling like home a while ago. A couple of frames are still lined up in a row, little ghosts of a life I tried so hard to grow into.
I wrap another picture in newspaper and set it carefully in the box. My hands move on autopilot.
Pack.
Fold.
Tuck.
Tape.
If I don’t look at the photos too closely, they’re easier to treat like objects instead of proof.
The front door opens behind me.
The sound is so familiar my body reacts before my mind does. Heavy steps. Keys against wood. A quiet exhale like he’s pushing the day off his shoulders.
For a second, I tell myself I imagined it.
Then I hear his bag hit the entryway table and my stomach drops clean through the floor.
No, no, no, no.
This isn’t how this was supposed to go.
I freeze, fingers fisted in a sheet of crinkled newspaper. My heart bangs against my ribs, too loud in the quiet house. I stare at the crooked stack of framed photos on the shelf in front of me and try to remember how to breathe like a normal person.
His footsteps come closer. Down the short hall. Across the hardwood.
They stop at the edge of the living room.
Silence stretches, the same kind we’ve fallen into too easily these past months, only now it feels like it’s swallowing the room.
I don’t have to turn around to know exactly what he’s seeing. Three taped boxes by the couch. One open by my knee. The coffee table cleared except for the ring where his water bottle always lands. The small pile of things I labeled donate because I could not, in good conscience, keep them. The mug from that weekend trip we took, the kitchen apron he bought me because he thought it was cute. And that stupid ceramic dog we joked about for months. If I take them, I’ll only think of him every time I look at one of them.
“Sierra?”
His voice is low, rough from practice, like he’s already burned through half his words for the day. I swallow and force myself to look over my shoulder.
He’s standing in the doorway, hat turned backward, practice gear clinging to him in that way that tells me he came straight from the field. He looks tired… and stunned. His eyes move from the boxes to the empty spots on the walls. To me.
He wasn’t expecting this.
That’s its own kind of pain.
“Hey,” I say, because I’m an idiot and apparently that’s what my brain offers up in a crisis. “You’re home early.”
“Practice got cut short.” He steps inside, slow and careful, every movement weighted like he already knows what this means but isn’t ready to face it. His gaze drifts over the room again and he asks anyway. “What’s… all this?”
The cardboard box in front of me suddenly becomes the safest thing in the world. I turn back to it, pretend I have to fuss with the corner of a frame that’s already wrapped just fine.
“I, um. I’m just finishing up some packing.”
Smooth, Sierra.Nailed it.
