“Can I tell you something?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“When you left,” she begins. “When you moved away, I knew that was the right thing for you. I know it made sense, and Noah understood it.” She stops, choosing her words like she’s navigating a minefield. “But I missed you being around more than I thought I would.”
I look at the ceiling.
“I just mean that you were alwaysthere,” she continues. “And then you weren’t. The house felt different. Everything felt a bit different.”
There’s something happening in my chest that I’m taking my time with.
I don’t have the right words, so I reach onto the nightstand, grab my keys, and hand them to her.
“Need me to drive you somewhere?” she asks, confused.
“Just look.”
She holds up the keys so she can see them in the moonlight. Hanging there is the keychain she gave me the night before I left.
“You kept it?” she whispers, her voice cracking on the words.
“It was good to know where home was.”
“Griff, you’re going to make me cry.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t do that,” I tease.
She hits me with Gerald.
“Every place I went,” I say, “I’d look at it and think:there’s the keychain. There’s the beach. There’s the place you’re going back to.” I look toward the window. “It helped.”
She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
“What you’ve built… the fact that you went out there with nothing after… after losing her, and you just worked. You built something real. I’m proud of you. I don’t know if anyone’s told you that.”
Proud.
My grandmother said it a few times when I gave her the chance. Noah has said something similar. Donna, once, at dinner. I showed up late, and she’d saved me a plate, put her hand on my arm, and said, “You’ve done well, love.” I had to look at the ceiling then, too.
But there’s something about hearing it from Piper in a dark motel room at three in the morning.
A car passes somewhere outside. The headlights sweep across the window and are gone as quickly as they came.
“I was proud of you, too,” I tell her. “The article, and every time Noah mentioned something you were doing.”
She makes a quiet sound that’s not quite a laugh, but something close. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I know.”
“I would have liked to have known.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that, too.”
I don’t explain why I didn’t. She doesn’t push.
Truth is, I missed her too.
We’re both quiet until she laughs at something in her own head.
