“What you said the other day,” I said. “About moving toward something and calling it something else.”
She held my gaze. “What about it?”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Some things know where they’re going before we do.”
Something shifted in her expression. It was small but real.
“D…” she started.
I saw it coming this time, the moment before she pulled it back. And she did. Just like she always did.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said instead.
“You don’t have to thank me for that.”
“I do.”
She stepped closer, just enough to close the space between us again, and brushed the backs of her fingers against my arm. It was not accidental or meant to be rushed. Just placed there. Then she stepped back out of it, tucking her chin into her jacket, turning toward the street.
“I’ll text you when I get in,” she called out as she went.
“Okay.”
She walked off without looking back.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to, feeling the ghost of her hand on my arm and the weight of everything she hadn’t said sitting right between us.
Then I turned and headed for my car.
Chapter 13
NOVA
The house feltdifferent when I walked into it that night. No one else would have noticed it. The furniture hadn’t moved. The city lights outside the pane just above the front door hit the walls the same way it always did at that hour, catching the edge of the bench in the entryway, softening as it reached the hallway. Nothing had been rearranged, added, or taken away, but something in me had shifted just enough that the room didn’t receive me the same way.
I stood there longer than I needed to, keys still in my hand, listening to the quiet settle around me. The show was still in my body, the way certain moments lingered in your chest long after the music stopped. The way he held me had done that.
I set my keys down on the table and walked up the three flights of stairs.
The photograph was where I had left it, leaning against the wall behind the couch, angled slightly because the floor there wasn’t perfectly even. I had meant to hang it months ago. I didn’t because I told myself countless times that I needed to decide where it belonged, which wall made the most sense, what it should sit beside. All of that had sounded reasonable at the time. It was also not the truth.
The truth was that once I hung it, it would no longer be waiting. It would be placed, fixed, part of the house in a way that didn’t shift depending on how I felt when I looked at it. I had not been ready for that kind of certainty.
I crouched down and picked it up.
The large frame was cool in my hands. The mounted print inside it was a beautiful black-and-white I found and had blown up because to me it always felt like art. In it, my mother stood behind the table, one ear covered by headphones, her hand resting on the vinyl as if she were mid-decision. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She never did in pictures like this. She was looking out, with that face she made when she was reading the room in front of her, already moving ahead of whatever was happening.
That was the version of her I had been avoiding. Not the mother or the woman I had lost. It was the one who knew exactly what she was doing.
I set the frame back down carefully and straightened up as the third floor pulled at me before I could talk myself out of it at this late hour. Probably because I couldn’t sleep after a night like the one I had.
Before long, I moved into the middle of the room. For a while, I didn’t touch anything. I sat on the floor witheverything spread out around me and let myself see it the way it actually was. Not done or wrong. Just waiting on me to decide what belonged together. My records were still separated from hers in places, like I hadn’t committed. I reached for a stack and thumbed through it slowly, stopping on the ones that felt worn in a way mine didn’t. I didn’t have to check the labels to know which were hers.
My mother’s collection had always been organized in a way that made sense to her and no one else. I could follow it if I stayed close enough to how she thought, if I let memory guide me instead of logic. Mine had developed differently, built from how I listened, how I worked through sound when I needed to understand it. I had kept them separate without ever saying I was doing that.
It had felt respectful. It had also kept something from moving.
I reached for the first record within arm’s reach, one of hers, and turned it over in my hands. I could remember a time when she had played it, the way she would set it down, the way she would let the opening stretch just long enough before bringing something else in underneath it. I knew how she used it. I also knew how I would. That was the part that had been sitting just out of reach.
