Adrian immediately drops it into the donate pile.
A few minutes later, I catch myself staring at it.
I remember George shoving it into my hands on the walk back to the truck. He spent twenty minutes trying to win the damn thing in the arcade at the mall because I’d joked it would look stupid in my apartment.
I’d been right. It looks stupid, and I’d also kept it for two years.
Adrian follows my gaze.
“Right,” I say, mostly to myself. “Donate.”
He studies me for half a second, says nothing, and quietly moves it into the keep pile when he thinks I’m not looking.
Holloway is on the floor across the room, laptop open, photographing furniture, lamps, kitchen appliances, and whatever else I’m not taking with me.
Adrian sits beside him sorting boxes.
They arrived together yesterday and have basically been running my move ever since.
At some point I ordered takeout for everyone and dug the last unopened bottle of orange juice out of my fridge—the one George bought a few days before I left for Seattle.
The apartment is ninety-percent packed already. A week and a half of sorting through what belongs to the life I’m building and what belongs to the one I’m leaving. George’s flannel is still on the back of the kitchen chair. His work shirt is still folded over the arm of the couch. His boots are still by the door.
I haven’t touched any of it. Don’t know how to yet.
Adrian has been packing carefully around all of it without saying a word.
Trevor shows up later that afternoon carrying an assortment of gas station snacks—chips, beef jerky, gummy bears, and energy drinks.
He flops down next to Holloway, thumbs through the marketplace listings, and nods approvingly. “Good price on the lamp, but you could’ve gone higher though, mate.”
“I want it gone,” Holloway says.
We eat on the floor in the middle of everything because there’s nowhere else to sit. It’s not bad, actually—the four of us in the wreckage of my apartment, passing food around. It feels like something, having people here. It fills up the apartment the way the packing doesn’t.
Then Holloway looks up from his laptop.
“You holding up fine, Bradford?” he asks.
The room adjusts to the sudden change of mood.
My eyes drop to the moving box beside me. “Yeah, all good. Handed in my resignation last week.” It’s easier to start there. “Nate said the door’s always open if I miss them.”
“What do you plan to do now?” Adrian asks.
I study the crack in the concrete under my feet. “First thing is Mom. Depending on how treatment goes, I might move her into my late aunt’s palliative care facility. I’ll mostly be lookingafter her. I’ve also been helping out with the facility’s management since I visited, and they’ve offered me a full-time position. I’m going to start part-time first and see how it fits. There’s also an urgent care clinic nearby reviewing my application. I should hear back by the time I land.”
“You’re planning to stay busy,” Trevor comments, his accent thicker than usual. “Hard to miss why.”
“You good?” Holloway asks. “With leaving.”
I picture myself walking out through that ward. The nurses’ station. The break room with the coffee machine that’s been broken on the left side for three years, the handwritten sign above it that says USE THE RIGHT SIDE ONLY in progressively more exasperated capitals. Everything I chose when I was twenty-two and needed to prove something about who I was going to be.
“Yes,” I decide. “I built something real here. Had nothing to do with the Bradford name, what my family wanted or what I was supposed to become. Walking away from that…it just hurts more than I expected. That’s all. But it’s the right move.”
The three of them are quiet.
“Mate,” Trevor starts.
