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I towel-dried her hair and brushed it back as best I could, pulling it into a messy ponytail and carrying her to bed. She nuzzled her face into my neck and clutched my shirt and my heart pounded. I had to laugh. Even sloppy drunk, this woman had me.

Tucker jumped up and snuggled next to her as I tucked her in. She threw an arm around him and hugged him to her with a soft, “Tucker…”

No wonder he was disappointed to be home with me. If I got to sleep like that every night, I’d be pissed to be back with me too.

I walked through the house and locked up, turning off lights and collecting the empty bottle and tumbler, stepping around piles of her dead fiancé’s personal effects. I got a bucket from the garage and a glass of water for her and left them by the bed. I collected her phone from the bathroom floor to plug into the charger on her nightstand, dropping a few pills next to her water for the morning. She’d need them.

Afterward I went out to my truck and got the parts for her sink. I went about fixing it so I could wash the dishes, checking back in on her when it was done. She slept peacefully.

A large photograph of Sloan hung over her bed. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was a portrait of her from the side, naked and balancing on the balls of her feet, with her tattooed arm covering her breasts. It looked like a professional photo, one from a tattoo magazine. Maybe she’d done modeling before. God knows she was good-looking enough. It was a fantastic shot.

Pictures lined her dresser. Mostly her and another woman, who I assumed was Kristen. Sloan looked like the colorful one of the two, even though I knew she was more conservative than her friend. One frame showed them at Disneyland wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Another was them outside the Pantages Theatre with a Wicked poster behind them.

There were photos of Brandon too. I recognized him from the picture on The Huntsman’s Wife. He’d been a good-looking guy. He and Sloan had matched.

He had a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm. In one picture he wore a T-shirt that read BURBANK FIRE DEPARTMENT on it. There was a photo of him with Sloan on a beach, standing in the surf. Another one in a Tough Mudder frame showed him with Sloan, racing bibs pinned to their shirts. She wore knee-high socks and pigtails, smiling, covered in mud.

It was ridiculous to feel jealous of a man who’d been dead for two years, but I did. I wondered how I measured up. I was a very different person than he was. Just from these photos, I could see we had lived very different lives.

I went back out to the living room and lay down on the couch to spend the night in case she needed my help.

Who was I kidding? I was staying because I wanted to stay.

Something must have really affected her today, and I wondered if I had anything to do with it. She’d said she’d been thinking about me. I thought about what she said earlier on the phone, that she was in an in-between. I didn’t care where she was.

I wanted to be there with her.