“Yeah, and you stole it from me.” Percy pushes into my hand, meowing again. “I take it he’s why you’re here?” She nods. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Remember how I told you earlier he keeps pawing at the door?”
I look over at the spare bedroom she’s just pointed to with her thumb. “I remember.”
“When I came to check on him and give him a few treats after my interview, he was just meowing his head off. It didn’t matter how many snuggles or snackies I gave him, he wouldn’t chill. I finally got him calm after a while, but he started up about an hour ago and hasn’t stopped since. I was going to text Rory, but I was worried it was too late, and you were coming soon, so…” She lifts her shoulders and hands in anI don’t knowkind of way, then slumps back down. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. Ishouldapologize. I should have just told you to let him into the room.”
“Is that what he wants?”
I nod. “It’s his favorite spot.”
“Oh.” She wrinkles her brows. “Why?”
“Because of you.”
She jerks her head back. “What?”
I push to my full height, then stand over her, holding my hands out. “Come on. Up.”
Chloe lets me pull her up, and I wrap my arms around her when she stumbles backward a bit.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly.
“Stop apologizing to me, Clover.” I hold her steady. “You good?”
“I’m good.” She looks over at the door, where Percy is scratching and begging to be let in. “Want to fill me in on why that’s my fault?”
I sigh, then dip my chin and step away. “I’ll do you one better and show you.”
I close my hand around the cool knob and push the door open. Percy is inside before I even move it three inches, and I don’t have to flick on the light to know where he’s gone. I do it anyway, then step aside to let Chloe see.
To most, it probably doesn’t look like much. In fact, it might even look a bit disappointing, but not to her.
She gasps. “Callum…” Her eyes scan the room and the boxes stacked haphazardly across the floor. “Is this…”
“Everything you left behind? Yeah.”
She runs her hand over the dresser that used to be in our bedroom, the very one I fucked her on multiple times over. Then she moves to the box labeledChloe’s clothesand peers inside.
“Holy…” She reaches inside and pulls out a dress I haven’t seen her wear since… “I haven’t seen this since that last New Year’s Eve.”
I give her a tight-lipped smile. “I remember.”
It was the night everything changed, and when I saw that she had left it behind and didn’t pack it for her London trip, I didn’t think anything of it at first. But then she never came back, not really, so I packed it away along with everything else.
“I can’t believe you kept everything,” she says, taking in all the rest of the boxes.
Some contain things from our first apartment together in New York, then our second place in Ottawa, and our third in Chicago. A few hold items from her life before me, back when she lived with her parents in Tennessee, and a few are ones shedoesn’t know about, filled to the brim with stuff I found over the years, trinkets I thought she might like or that reminded me of her.
Then she walks over to our bed, the one we took with us everywhere, even after we could afford a much better one. The one where I made love to her on our wedding night, then as often as I could afterward. It was the first thing I got rid of when she left. I couldn’t stomach sleeping in it alone. It smelled like her and reminded me far too much of everything I had lost, so I ditched it and slept on the couch for a solid six months before I got a new one, only because the team chiropractor threatened to tell Coach if I didn’t start sleeping in a real bed.
It’s where Percy is curled up, right on her side.
“I told you it was his favorite place,” I say as she approaches the cat, who looks entirely too happy right now. “He comes in here all the time.”
I used to as well, but now I only come in to collect Percy and get out. This space holds too many painful memories for me to spend time in here.
