Page 11 of Return

The words settled between them. Not heavy. Just careful.

Vivian looked down at the table, her fingers toying with the stem of her wineglass as she thought about Phil. His face, his voice, his laugh, all of it, always played in the background of her everyday life.

There had been a time when thinking about him felt like pressing on a bruise that covered her entire chest, but that unending ache had eased. Now, the pain was different. It was still there, but nowadays, it felt survivable. Unlike those first weeks and months following his passing, when she was certain she would drown in her own grief.

“I never got to meet Phil, but Victor always spoke very highly of him,” Dean said. “I figure he must have been something pretty special to get by your personal bulldog of a brother.”

Vivian smiled, huffing out a laugh. “I don’t talk about him much,” she admitted quietly. “When he died…” She exhaled slowly. “Everything happened at once.”

She could recall the hospital corridors, the nauseating smell of antiseptic, the exhaustion that no amount of sleep could cure.

“He had a glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumor. We found out about it just a few months after we discovered I was pregnant.”

Dean rubbed his jaw, his eyes sad. “Jesus. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for both of you.”

“I spent a lot of that first year after he passed away pissed off at the world. I mean, there are some truly shitty humans on this planet, while Phil was one of the best. He was an amazing teacher and husband and friend.” Vivian heard the hint of anger hovering around the edges of her words. No amount of time would ever change that. Her grief ebbed and flowed depending on the day, but the anger level always remained steady.

“I’m sure he was.”

Vivian’s eyes lost focus briefly as she continued. “He died a month before Pip was born.”

“Fuck,” Dean mumbled under his breath.

“I went from planning a funeral to bringing home a newborn. Honestly, I don’t remember those first few months. If it hadn’t been for Victor and Belle, I’m not sure what I would have done. They kept me afloat.”

She remembered enough. Like the sleepless nights and the waves of grief that constantly crashed into her. The guilt she felt as she watched Pip’s first smile, when she heard her first laugh, when her daughter took her first steps. She struggled to understand why she got to see all those things when Phil didn’t.

But the worst had been the bone-shaking fear that she would fail the tiny baby girl who depended on her for everything.

Dean listened without interrupting. He didn’t look at her with pity—something she’d had enough of to last her a lifetime—but with compassion.

“It’s strange,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “While I don’t talk about Phil much, I think about him constantly. Is that weird?”

Dean shook his head. “Not at all. Tell me about him. What did you love the most about him?”

“He was…” She smiled. “He was sort of awkward and shy, the kind of guy who was easy to overlook until you saw him. Then he was impossible to miss. He was also one of the funniest men I’ve ever known. We met in a science class during our freshman year. We sat next to each other for nearly a month, but he never spoke a word to me. Then one day, out of the blue, he asked if I’d be interested in tutoring him. He said he was struggling with some of the stuff in the class. He even offered to pay me. I agreed, so for the next month and a half, we met in the library three afternoons a week. At first, we talked only about the class. But soon our sessions became less about the course and more about getting to know each other.

“Then one day, I overheard him talking to our professor after class. I’d forgotten my notebook and had gone back for it. It turned out that Phil had been excelling in the class the entire time. Hell, he’d had a higher grade than me! When I confronted him, he said he’d wanted to ask me out since the first day of class, but he figured someone as pretty and smart as me already had a boyfriend, so he hatched the tutoring scheme.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “That’s a stroke of goddamn genius there.”

Vivian giggled. “It really was. Except, as I told Phil, if he’d asked me out, I would have said yes. So after that, the tutoring sessions ended and we started dating. I paid for the first half dozen dates or so, with the money he’d given me for the tutoring he never needed.”

Dean cracked up loudly. “Sounds like a perfect beginning.”

“It was. We were inseparable after that. Phil was the kind of person who remembered everyone’s birthday, who made friends everywhere he went, and he was endlessly patient.”

Dean smiled.

“He would have been such a great dad.” Her throat tightened.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

“I haven’t told that story to anyone since he died.”

Dean reached across the table, grasping her hand. “I’m glad you told me.”

“For a long time, every memory hurt.” She pressed her free hand lightly against her chest. “Like someone was stabbing me with something sharp, right here, between my ribs.”