Chapter 17 #3
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, the latch clicking into place like punctuation.
She didn’t bother taking off her coat right away.
She just moved in stiff, aching silence through the dim front hall, past the quiet of the living room with its faded, worn armchairs and the ghost of warming radiators, into the kitchen where the air still smelled faintly of apples and something herbal.
Without turning on a light, she reached for the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter— something she’d opened a few nights back, for no real reason besides that she could.
She didn’t bother with a glass, just took a long pull straight from the neck, then leaned her hip against the counter and waited for the heat to crawl down her throat and settle in her chest like a false comfort.
She drank again, slower this time, but deeper, too.
The silence pressed against her skin like a second layer. Not oppressive, just thick. Weighty. Full of everything she didn’t want to name.
She drank until her shoulders loosened. Until the sharp edges dulled.
And then she moved.
Not upstairs, not to bed. Down.
The basement door groaned on its hinges when she pulled it open.
The air hit her like a memory— cool and damp and earthy, with the faint scent of mothballs and old cardboard.
She flicked on the light at the top of the stairs.
It sputtered once, then buzzed to life, casting long shadows over the narrow wooden steps and the crumbling stone walls below.
She hadn’t been down here in years.
The boxes were where she remembered them, tucked beneath the long wooden shelves that still held half-empty jars of nails and mismatched bolts and a rusted watering can that might’ve belonged to someone three generations ago.
The moving boxes were slumped together like a collapsed spine, softened by time, their Sharpie labels faded and bleeding.
Some were sealed with brittle tape that flaked apart beneath her grip and others had been opened years ago, peeked into, then closed again without the courage to finish.
Hazel dragged five of the empty ones upstairs and to the second floor, a couple at a time. The cardboard scratched her arms, tore faint lines into the fabric of her coat, but she didn’t care. She set them in the upstairs hallway and stared at them for a long moment, as if expecting them to speak.
Then she turned and faced her grandmother’s bedroom door.
She hadn’t opened it since coming home. Not fully. Not with intention. Maybe once or twice she’d cracked it, long enough to grab something from the laundry basket on the bed or to avoid the ache that came with pretending the room didn’t exist. But she hadn’t stepped inside, not really.
Not until now.
The door creaked open under her palm.
And there it was. Still and familiar.
The smell hit her first— lavender and cedar, soft and clean, with something warmer beneath it.
Cinnamon, maybe, or the faint echo of an old candle that had once lived on the nightstand.
The room felt suspended in time, as if it had been waiting for her.
The bed was still made, the covers drawn smooth across the old patchwork quilt.
The curtains were half-drawn, allowing in the golden glow of the streetlamp beyond the trees, and her grandmother’s slippers still sat by the footboard, slightly askew.
Hazel stood in the doorway, unmoving. Her eyes swept the space.
The heavy four-poster bed, the white wicker dresser with its lace runner and the Santo Nino displayed at the center, a remnant of the life her great-grandmother had left behind before moving to America as a young woman.
The porcelain dish that still held earrings and hair ties and a random peppermint, a stack of folded scarves in the corner, some patterned, some plain.
And then there was the chair— the old, antique armchair with the rounded arms and the soft, beige upholstery— where her grandmother had sat to write Christmas cards every year, one leg folded beneath her, her glasses low on her nose.
Hazel didn’t cry. She refused to.
She was here to do a thing. Just a task. A clinical, adult task. Packing, sorting, readying. That was all. She would start with the closet or the drawer by the bed. She didn’t know which.
She stepped inside and reached for the first box.
But it wasn’t clinical. Not even close.
The memories came too fast. Too full.
It wasn’t the scent or the slippers or the quilt that undid her. It was the small dip in the center of the bed, the place where she’d once curled into herself, a hot water bottle pressed low to her stomach, her cheeks flushed and her eyes watery with pain.
She remembered the night with a clarity that felt cruel.
She had been thirteen, or maybe twelve, it was hard to say.
All she remembered was the deep, twisting ache in her abdomen and the way she’d stumbled down the hallway in the dark, unsure of what was happening.
Her grandmother had woken instantly, as if summoned by instinct, and ushered her into bed without hesitation.
She’d warmed the bottle, made a cup of ginger tea, and returned upstairs with a chocolate bar, broken into careful squares, insisting Hazel eat even though she wasn’t hungry.
And then she’d sat there, on the edge of the bed, in her old flannel robe, brushing Hazel’s hair back from her damp forehead with slow, rhythmic strokes.
“Your mother has the worst periods,” she’d said in a quiet voice, a fondness in her tone that softened the weight of the words. “All throughout her life. I hope you didn’t inherit that from her.”
Hazel hadn’t answered. She’d just closed her eyes, sinking deeper into the sheets that smelled like rosewater and soap, and her grandmother had stayed there, one hand still in her hair, eyes gentle, full of a kind of love Hazel had only ever found in this house.
In this room. In the space between pain and comfort, when everything else had gone quiet.
Hazel stood there now, frozen, that memory settling over her like dust.
She blinked. Once, then twice.
Still, she didn’t cry.
Instead, she set her jaw, reached for the top drawer of the nightstand, and began to empty it into the open box at her feet.
But the motions weren’t steady. They were frantic and shaky, too fast.
The scent of lavender deepened around her, stirred up by every item she moved. A folded handkerchief, a bottle of hand lotion, a velvet-lined jewelry box with a missing clasp. The memories kept coming, louder now. Unwelcome and unstoppable. Her throat felt tight and her eyes burned.
She pulled open another drawer, this one within the wicker dresser across from the bed.
And then another.
She was breathing hard by then, like she’d been running.
Her hands shook as she placed a stack of letters into the box, each one worn thin at the edges, each envelope creased and soft with time.
She told herself not to look, not to read, but her fingers moved without asking.
Slower now and less practical, she paused over a bundle tied together with pale blue ribbon that had faded to almost grey, the ends frayed like something beloved and handled often.
The handwriting on the envelopes was her own, crooked and earnest and unpolished in the earliest ones, growing steadier as the years passed.
They were birthday cards. All of them.
Some store-bought, sure, picked out during hurried visits to the corner store in town, covered in flowers or owls or hand-lettered quotes, but most of them were made by hand.
Folded cardstock, mismatched markers, construction paper cut with scalloped scissors.
Messages written in bright ink. Stickers in the margins.
Hazel recognized her own effort in every one of them, her quiet insistence that her grandmother be celebrated properly.
Fully. With the kind of attention and intention she’d always deserved and so rarely received.
She remembered the way her grandmother once said it, offhandedly, like she was brushing dust from the windowsill.
“Sharing your birthday with Christmas is a real curse when you’ve got six siblings.
There’s only so much cake to go around. Makes the most sense not to have it when you’re already celebrating something else.
” She’d said it with a small smile, not quite bitter, not quite amused, but Hazel had felt it anyway.
That subtle ache, tucked between the words.
The kind that didn’t fade, just settled into the bones.
She had recognized it instantly, committing her grandmother’s own bruise that no longer showed to memory.
And so every year, Hazel had tried to make it different. Better.
A homemade card and a birthday cake all to herself.
One of those oversized mugs of tea with the honey already stirred in and a single piece of toast, made golden in the toaster, her favourite orange marmalade spread edge to edge.
She’d wake early just to have it all ready by the time her grandmother’s slippers shuffled softly down the stairs and into the kitchen.
She flipped one of the cards open now, her thumb dragging along the crease.
It was one she’d made in high school from pale yellow cardstock, her writing a bit more contained by then, the loops smaller.
Inside, a photo slipped out and fluttered to the floor, landing face-up against the worn hardwood.
Hazel froze.
It was them.
Her and her grandmother, years ago, the Christmas tree blurred in the background, lights twinkling like distant stars, the soft sprawl of opened presents out of focus on the edge of the frame.
Her grandmother sat in the old floral armchair, a cake balanced on her lap, a single candle already melted halfway down.
Hazel stood behind her, hands resting lightly on her shoulders, chin tilted down toward the crown of that familiar greying hair.
They were both smiling— not posed, not polite, but warm. Real.
Hazel reached for it with careful fingers. They were trembling again.
She stared at it for a long time.
The photo looked like a memory made visible— one of the rare ones that hadn’t been clouded by grief or confusion or that gnawing loneliness she’d carried for so long. Just the two of them, present and whole. For a moment, everything else had fallen away.
Her grandmother’s eyes in the picture were dark and kind, crinkled at the corners.
Hazel could almost hear her voice again, soft and dry with amusement.
“You’re fussing too much, Hazel. It’s just a birthday.
” And Hazel, as always, refusing to believe it.
Refusing to let her be forgotten, even for a day.
Her thumb drifted across the surface of the photo. The paper was matte, slightly curled at the edges. Not glossy, not preserved, but treasured all the same.
The ache in her chest expanded, pressing hard beneath her ribs.
It was too much and not enough all at once.
All she’d wanted to do was pack. Make things neat.
Give herself a sense of direction, of control.
But now her knees were going weak beneath her and her throat was closing and all she could think was how fast it had gone. How final everything suddenly felt.
She set the photo down with reverence, like it might shatter. Then gently, carefully, she laid the stack of birthday cards on top of it. One hand rested there for a moment, hers fingers splayed like she could protect it all. Like memory could be guarded with touch alone.
She had told herself she wasn’t going to cry, but she already was.
Not hot. Not loud. Just slow and relentless.
And she kept packing. She kept trying to hold herself together.
But everything she touched was a thread, each object pulling loose another memory, another year, another version of herself she hadn’t thought about in ages. A paper bookmark, a dried flower, a photo of her mother, smiling and young and before.
Hazel folded inward, then, just slightly. As if the weight of it all was too much for her spine to carry.
And in the quiet, in that room that still smelled like the woman who had loved her best, Hazel whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t even know what for.
Only that it felt true.
Only that it felt like the beginning of letting go.