21. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
I know the exact time because I’d been watching the clock on the microwave, counting the minutes until it was late enough to justify going to bed and calling the day a loss.
I was sitting on my rental cottage’s couch, second glass of wine in hand, wearing Kevin’s old Johns Hopkins shirt because apparently I had zero self-respect.
The wind had been throwing itself against the windows for an hour, salt and rain off the harbor rattling the old glass in its frames.
The lights flickered once, twice, and then everything went dark.
“Perfect,” I muttered to the empty room. “Absolutely perfect.”
I fumbled for my phone and turned on the flashlight, navigating toward the kitchen to check the breaker box.
It was fine. Every switch sat where it should.
The whole neighborhood must be out, then.
Through the window over the sink I saw nothing but black houses and the pale smear of a single porch light two doors down running off somebody’s generator.
I should have been prepared for this, should have bought candles and one of those emergency weather radios they sell at the hardware store on Orange Street. Instead I had two bottles of wine, a bag of chips gone soft in the humidity, and a wardrobe of clothes that didn’t belong to me.
I caught sight of myself in the dark window, phone light throwing my own face back at me in hard angles and turning me into a stranger. Kevin’s shirt hung past my thighs. I’d told myself I was wearing it because it was comfortable, because I’d forgotten to do laundry.
All lies.
I was wearing it because it made me feel close to him without having to admit I wanted to be close to him. Three years divorced and I still slept in the man’s undershirt.
My phone showed three bars of signal, glowing in my hand.
His number was still in my contacts, right at the top where it had always lived.
I’d never deleted it, even after the divorce, even after three years of pretending he didn’t exist. Deleting it would’ve meant admitting I might want to call it someday.
I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
It rang once.
Panic seized my chest and squeezed. What was I doing? What would I even say? Hi, Kevin, I’m sitting alone in the dark wearing your shirt and thinking about you, how’s your arm?
I hung up.
My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in the silence. I set the phone down on the counter and backed away from it.
It buzzed.
A text message. From Kevin.
“If that was an accident, ignore this. If it wasn’t, I’m awake.”
My belly filled with butterflies. He’d answered in seconds.
Made himself available immediately. No questions, no judgment, just I’m here if you need me.
There’d been a time when I would’ve given anything for exactly this, and the fact that I was getting it now, three years too late, made my throat go tight.
I used to yearn for this, lie awake in our bed dreaming about a Kevin who would drop everything when I reached out. A Kevin who wouldn’t let it ring through to voicemail while he stayed one more hour at the office.
I typed a response. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too. Every version sounded either too cold or too desperate, and I couldn’t find the middle where I actually lived.
I set the phone face-down and walked away.
What I needed was to cleanse myself spiritually. Clear my head. Get Kevin Coleman out of my system through the power of positive energy and probably more wine.
I found a box of incense in the bathroom cabinet, left by some previous tenant.
Lavender and sage, the label promised, though it had faded to nearly nothing.
Perfect for spiritual cleansing. I grabbed a lighter from the kitchen drawer and headed to the living room, the floorboards cold under my bare feet.
The incense lit easily. I waved it around, feeling ridiculous, muttering affirmations I’d read in a self-help book three years ago in the raw first weeks after I’d left.
“I release attachment to outcomes,” I said to the dark room. “I’m whole and complete on my own. I don’t need Kevin Coleman to feel fulfilled.”
The smoke curled toward the ceiling, thin and gray in the beam of my flashlight.
Directly into the smoke detector.
The alarm was deafening, a shriek so loud it seemed to vibrate my bones, and a strobe light turned the dark room into a nightmare disco. My glass tipped off the arm of the couch and wine bled into the rug.
“No no no no no.”
I grabbed a legal pad from the coffee table and started fanning the detector, trying to clear the smoke. It didn’t help. If anything, the alarm got louder, the strobe pulsing white across the walls until my eyes watered.
I was still standing on the couch, legal pad flailing over my head, when the fire department arrived.
Two trucks pulled up with four firefighters in full gear, because of course they did.
“Ma’am?” The first one through the door looked concerned, a flashlight the size of my forearm sweeping the room. “We got an automatic alarm from this address.”
“I’m fine!” I shouted over the still-screaming detector. “I was trying to light incense!”
“You were what?”
“INCENSE. To cleanse myself spiritually!”
He stared at me. At the legal pad in my hand. At my bare legs beneath Kevin’s oversized shirt. I watched the whole situation register on his face and settle somewhere between concern and pity.
“Right,” he said slowly. “Let’s get that alarm disabled.”
It took them ten minutes to shut everything down and confirm there was no actual fire. By then, half the neighborhood was standing in the street watching, drawn out of their dark houses by the trucks, and I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear.
“You’re all set, ma’am,” the firefighter said, snapping his flashlight off. “Just maybe skip the incense next time.”
“Noted. Thank you. I’m so sorry.”
They were packing up their equipment when another car pulled into the driveway, headlights swinging across the front windows.
Kevin’s car.
He got out and strode toward the cottage, his face tight with worry, half-lit by the flashing rack lights on the trucks. He was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, hair flattened on one side.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Are you hurt? I heard the address on the scanner and I-”
He stopped.
His eyes traveled down my body. The oversized shirt. My bare legs. The legal pad still clutched in both my hands, forgotten there.
“Why do you have a fire department scanner?” I asked.
“Why are you half-naked in front of my friends from the fire department?”
“They’re your FRIENDS?”
“We had an incident a few years ago. Backyard grilling gone wrong. We bonded over the insurance claim.” He was already pulling off his hoodie, dragging it over his head so his shirt rode up and I looked away on principle. “Put this on.”
“I don’t need to-”
“Stephanie.” His voice was firm, the one he used to use when he was worried and covering it with authority. “Put it on.”
I put it on. The fabric was warm from his body, and it smelled like him, cedar and the faint hospital sharpness that never fully washed out of him, and I was now wearing two pieces of his clothing while standing in front of emergency responders.
“Hey, Kevin,” one of the firefighters called from the truck. “Didn’t know this was your ex-wife’s place.”
“Neither did I until thirty seconds ago.”
“She seems nice.”
“She’s the best person I’ve ever met.” Kevin’s voice carried no irony, none of the performance he used with strangers. “Also the most disaster-prone. You guys need anything before you head out?”
They waved goodbye and pulled away, the trucks rumbling off down the narrow street. The neighbors slowly dispersed, porch doors clicking shut one by one. Soon it was just Kevin and me, standing in the dark cottage, surrounded by the fading smell of incense and my own humiliation.
“So,” he said. “Spiritual cleansing?”
“Shut up.”
“I’m not judging. I once tried to sage my apartment after a bad breakup. Set off three alarms and nearly got evicted.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. My therapist suggested it. She failed to mention the importance of proper ventilation.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed, and the sound surprised me, rusty from disuse.
He smiled at me in the darkness, his face lit only by the glow of my phone on the counter, half in shadow. “Can I stay? Just until the power comes back. I’ll make dinner.”
“You can’t cook.”
“I’ve improved. Marginally.” He held up two fingers, an inch apart. “I can now make sandwiches without setting anything on fire.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“It’s my bar. I’m proud of it.”
I should have said no, sent him home and gone to bed and continued my pathetic spiral in private, where no witnesses could see me unravel.
“Fine,” I heard myself say. “But if you burn down my kitchen, you’re explaining it to the fire department.”
“Deal.”
He made sandwiches by flashlight, propping the phone against the fruit bowl so it threw light across the counter.
Turkey and cheese with mustard, exactly how I liked them, mustard to the edges, cut on the diagonal.
He remembered. Of course he remembered. We sat on the floor, our backs against the couch, plates balanced on our knees.
“This is very romantic,” I said dryly. “Eating in the dark because I can’t afford a generator.”
“You could afford a generator. You’re just stubborn about accepting anything that feels like excessive wealth.”
“Generators are for people who give up on the power company too easily.”
“The power company has given up on this neighborhood. I passed four downed lines on my way here.”
“Then I’ll light candles.”
“You just proved you can’t be trusted with fire.” He looked pointedly at the wine bleeding into the rug, then up at the smoke detector.
“That was incense. Different category.”
“Same element.”
We argued about power outages. About whether rich people had lost the ability to suffer minor inconveniences. It was easy, the way it used to be easy, the words falling into their old grooves.