I didn’t move away.
Downstairs, Gus was going to wake up before long and shuffle to the kitchen and want breakfast, and the world was going to reassert itself with all its usual noise and demands and the chaos of a Saturday morning in this house. We were going to have to figure out what came next. What this meant. What we were going to do with it, and what it changed, and what it didn’t. How two people who had known each other since the third grade were supposed to navigate the fact that everything was different now and somehow, impossibly, exactly the same.
But she was warm against me and her fingers were resting easy over mine and the morning light was still soft and pale against the curtains, and for right now, in this quiet pocket of time before the world remembered we existed, that was enough.
Later, I thought, pressing my lips gently to the back of her hair.
We’d figure it out later.
FIFTEEN
ELLIE
The problem with having nothing to do was that it left entirely too much room for thinking.
Grandpa’s friend Hector Beaumont had shown up this morning with his big Lincoln Continental and the cheerful authority of a man who’d been waiting for an excuse to be useful. They’d gone off to PT together and then presumably to whatever retired men did on a Thursday morning. Probably second breakfast at Kiss My Grits, where they’d likely run into the Three Wise Men, who liked to opine about everybody in Huckleberry Creek. Which was lovely. It was lovely that Grandpa’s friends showed up and that it gave me a few hours of breathing room, because the last two weeks had been relentless. I genuinely needed a break.
What I did not need was the silence.
The silence was catastrophic. The silence had no agenda, nothing to look at, nothing to manage, and in the absence of all of those things my brain shot straight back to circling the same thing it had circled for three days like water going down a drain.
Daniel’s hands.
That was the problem. I knew what his hands felt like now. Not in the abstract, not in the way I’d been carefully not-thinking about since the kiss in the hospital room, but concretely, specifically, in the most intimate possible terms. I remembered the weight of his palm spread low across my skin. The deliberate, devastating patience of his fingers, the way he paid attention with them the way he paid attention to everything—completely, without rushing, like there was nowhere else he needed to be.
And he knew.
That was the other half of it, the half I kept getting stuck on, spinning out on in the quiet of the house with Grandpa gone and no one here to make me perform being normal. He knew what I sounded like. He knew, with the same terrible specificity that I knew things about him, exactly what sounds I made and when, and what it took to get there, and what my face did afterward in the soft gray of the early morning when I’d stopped being careful about what it did.
We were best friends.
Best friends who were accidentally legally married, fine, yes, but still. Best friends who’d agreed, years ago, with the clear-eyed certainty of two people who valued their relationship, that this particular door stayed closed. And yet he’d gone and bought a ring at a flea market four years ago for reasons he couldn’t name, and I’d married him in a hospital room, and we’d shared a bed, and now I knew about his hands, and I had no idea how to go back to being the people we’d been before any of this.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.
That last part was the most terrifying part. That was the part I kept skidding past and circling back to with the compulsive horror of someone poking a bruise. Because wanting to go back would have been manageable. Missing the simplicity of before would have made sense, would have given me something to move toward, a clear direction. But standing in the kitchen of myown house on a Thursday morning with the silence pressing in from all sides, the honest answer was that I did not want to go back.
I heard his truck.
My brain fuzzed out, like Grandpa’s old TV when the antenna broke.
By the time Daniel’s key turned in the lock, I was in the pantry.
I was reorganizing the canned goods. By category, and then within category by size, and this was a task that urgently needed doing and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t standing in the middle of the kitchen looking like a woman who’d spend the past three days thinking about his hands and what they could do to me.
From somewhere behind me, he said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said to the canned tomatoes. “How was shift?”
“Fine.” A pause. “What are you doing?”
“Reorganizing.”
Another pause, longer. “The pantry.”
“It’s been a mess for months.”
“Ellie.”
