Adam gently bites his lip, some thought occupying his mind. “Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work, then,” he says and heads for the stairs.
Grace listens to the sound of his footsteps, followed by the creak of doors opening, first in the primary bedroom, then in the smaller one beside it. When they first saw that room at the open house, Grace imagined painting it a soft pink, putting a plush glider in the corner. Now it’s a hodgepodge. An old dresser. Piles of items never returned. So many forgotten things.
We’ve lost our way from each other, Grace,Adam said the night of his announcement.
Of course they had. If their marriage were a book,losswould have been its theme.
The day they moved into this home—fresh off Grace’s first book tour—they pulled into the driveway only to learn that the moving company had lost half their boxes. The next week, they were forced to smash a window because they’d lost their only key. One month later, Grace’s doctor informed her that the baby—the one that’d been growing inside her all summer—was lost, too.
Six more losses over the next four years. Each one left them a little more hollow. Still, every time, they told themselves it would eventually work out. Doctors poked and prodded Grace, testing her for countless issues, only to inform her that nothing was clinically wrong. Fertility, it turned out, was a sort of game. One ruled by odds. Timing. Chance. They kept trying. By the third loss, they stopped buying the baby books. By the fifth, they stopped looking at the spare bedroom entirely. The last loss occurred shortly beforetheir trip to Maine. When the ultrasound tech delivered the news, they were both so drained that they just shrugged.
“So you’re heading up to the lake house?” Grace asks Adam once they’re out on the porch watching the moving truck pull away. The home in question, a vacation spot in New Hampshire, belongs to his parents. Despite the property’s undeniable beauty and picturesque views, she’d never gotten past the thought of the insects and snakes swimming beneath the water’s dark surface. All the small things she feared but couldn’t see. He could keep it.
“For a few days. Work’s quiet. It’ll be good to get away.” Adam adjusts the duffel bag’s strap on his shoulder. “What about you? Any big plans for the weekend?”
“Pffft.” She laughs. It sounds like she’s a raft someone squeezed too hard. “I have a book due in a few weeks, which I haven’t quite written.” She looks back at the house, thinking of everything else that waits for her inside it. “Among other things.”
Adam waits, like he has something else to say. Whatever it is, he clearly thinks better of it. Instead, he steps closer, puts his arms out for an awkward hug. It’s clumsy, like they’re teenagers faced with a first embrace, neither of them sure how to angle their heads or what to do with their hands. Thankfully, it only lasts a moment before he pulls away.
“Tell the eels and slugs I said hi,” Grace calls out, forcing lightness into her tone as he walks to the curb.
“Will do.” Adam opens his car door, then stops. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He meets her gaze, pauses. “Happy early birthday, Grace.”
“Oh.” Her head jerks. The words land heavier than they should. “Um ... thanks.”
Adam looks at her for a second too long, as if he’s debating something.
“I may have forgotten your coffee order.” His voice is softer, now that there’s distance between them, and touched by an emotion Grace can’t quite name. “But contrary to what you might think, I haven’t forgotten everything.”
Three
I ’m drowning,” Grace announces, and falls backward onto the couch, like someone auditioning for a melodrama. A small wooden trinket box—once perched on her girlhood dresser—jabs her in the spine. “Maybe not literally, seeing as I’m on dry land.” She sets it beside her phone, currently on speaker. “Butdefinitelyemotionally.”
“You opened them, didn’t you?” Jenny asks, employing her signature nurturing, yet exasperated, tone. Jenny has been Grace’s best friend since the first day of sixth grade, when they walked into homeroom wearing the same purple shirt and scrunchie. They’ve remained inseparable—or as much as life allows—ever since. “Itoldyou not to go through them alone.”
“It didn’t seem this bad in my mind,” Grace mumbles, surveying the chaos she’s unpacked. Her old retainer. Teenage diaries. Floppy disks. Birthday cards. College essays. Rolled-up posters. Souvenirs from every era of her life. It’s like a strange pop-up museum exhibit.Grace: A Retrospective. “I also forgot my mother saved every shred of paper I ever touched. She was like a hoarder, but only with my memories.”
Once Adam left, Grace did everything to avoid the boxes. Scrubbed the sink. Checked the mail. Cleaned the fridge. Brought her laptop downstairs, hoping—then failing—to craft a single page. Still, the stacks loomed. She started with Birdie’s belongings—the boxes Grace packed up herself a few weeks earlier—before moving on to the others. The ones her mother had been privately packing up for years.
“Stop what you’re doing,” Jenny says, her backdrop a cacophony of joyful mayhem. Kids shouting. Something crashing. The baby crying. “I’m coming over. We’ll schlep everything to the basement, which is what youshouldhave had the movers do in the first place when—”
“You don’t need to come here,” Grace interrupts, flipping through an old journal filled with her adolescent attempts at poetry. “I live two hours away. You have three children.”
In high school, Jenny—a preppy soccer star—went through a brief rebellious phase. Blue hair. A longing to head west. For a year, she made everyone call her “Niffer”—an unnatural abbreviation of her first name, Jennifer. Today? She lives ten minutes from their hometown in Bucks County with her husband, Eric. Her school-age kids carry Pottery Barn backpacks. During the holidays, she sends photo cards of her family in matching tartan. People change.
“Fine. Plan B. You come here for a few days. Stay in the spare room. Swim. Work on your book. See the kids. They miss you, and—Charlie! Stop hitting your sister with the dinosaur!” Jenny exclaims, then pulls back. “Plus, we can celebrate your birthday on Wednesday. I’ll make pancakes. Youlovemy pancakes.”
“It’s true.” Grace tears open the packaging tape on a new box, this one labeledMiscellaneous. No category. No date. Just memories. “You really do make the best breakfasts.”
“What was that noise?” Jenny asks, instantly suspicious. “Did you open another one?”
“I sneezed,” she says, reaching for a joke.
“Grace.”
“Look, I appreciate the offer—allyour offers. But I’m not great company right now. It’s better that I’m alone.”
“Haven’t you basically been alone all summer?”
