Page 123 of We Are Just Us

“You’re the worst,” Kieran said.

“And yet?” Rory picked up the knife and went back to the cutting board like he hadn’t just stopped Kieran’s heart for three full seconds. “Boyfriend.” He said it quietly. To the sandwiches.

But Kieran heard it.

Then Rory glanced up. The joke was gone from his face. What was left was the look of a man who’d been waiting for someone to call him that and didn’t know it until he heard it.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Wednesday morning arrived with the kind of coastal fog that made everything muted and close.

Kieran sat at his kitchen table with his laptop open, coffee cooling beside him.

On the screen, Jim leaned back in his home office chair, hair pulled into a loose bun, a faded tie-dye shirt that looked like it had survived Woodstock and three garage sales. The familiar wall of books behind him. Waiting in that particular way therapists wait—patient, as if silence were just another tool.

They’d already covered the basics. Rory. The boyfriend thing. Their negative test results. How it felt. Jim had smiled at the right moments and asked the right questions and Kieran had given the answers he’d been rehearsing in his head since the session started.

But there was something else. Jim could tell.

“What aren’t you saying?” Jim asked.

Kieran looked at his coffee. Picked it up. Set it down without drinking.

“I’ve been thinking about my mom’s ashes.”

Jim’s posture shifted, still warm, but more focused. “What about them?”

“She wanted the East Coast. The Jersey Shore. That’s where she grew up.” Kieran turned his coffee mug in his hands. “I never did it. I’ve had her in a box by the fireplace for two years because I couldn’t…going back there was too far. Too hard. Too final.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m thinking maybe I don’t need to go back there. Maybe I could do it here.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “The oceans are all connected, right? It’s the same water. She’d still get there eventually.”

“How does that feel? The idea of scattering them?”

“Scary.” Kieran swallowed. “Like if I do it, she’s officially gone. Like I’m choosing to move forward without her.”

“Is that what it means to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it means I’m finally giving her the goodbye she deserved instead of keeping her in a box because I’m too scared to deal with my grief.”

Jim nodded. “You kept those ashes for two years. That’s not nothing. What changed?”

Kieran thought about his mom. Her sharp humor. Her impatience with his overthinking. The way she never let him wallow.

“Honestly, she’d probably tell me to stop being so dramatic and just throw her in the ocean already.”

Jim smiled. “That sounds like her.”

“She hated when I made things harder than they needed to be.”

“What do you think she’d say about Rory?”

Kieran’s throat tightened. “I think she’d like him. He’s direct. No bullshit. She respected that.”

“Sounds like my husband,” Jim said. “Took me three years to realize that directness was his version of tenderness.” He paused. “Do you think she’d want you to be happy?”

“Yeah. I do.”