Chapter 6 #2
The grocery store is new enough to smell like still-wet paint.
Cool air slaps me at the doors and my skin pebbles; I forgot a hoodie and the produce section always wants to be a tundra.
Fluorescents hum. A kid in a cart sings a warbly ABC, skipping around G like it did him wrong.
I grab a basket and do the list in Tommy order, which means meats first (so he can “format the week,” as if chicken breasts are code) and then veggies he’ll pretend not to like and then household stuff he notices before I do.
Paper towels, dishwasher pods. The domesticity of it would have made me cry five years ago. Today it makes me feel rooted.
I’m at the dairy case reaching for eggs when the hairs on the back of my neck lift.
It’s not loud. Not even clear. More like a static behind my ears. A feeling that isn’t a feeling so much as a nudge. I stay bent at the waist, fingers on a carton, and let my eyes flick to the reflection in the case glass.
Shoppers move in reverse: a woman in a sundress inspecting yogurt labels like they’re lying to her, a dude in work boots juggling two gallons of milk, a teenager staring at her phone so hard she might fall in. No one looking at me.
I straighten, check the carton of eggs to verify no cracks, put it in the basket. The nudge doesn’t go.
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s leftover adrenaline with nowhere to go. Maybe it’s—my phone vibrates in my back pocket.
The sound spikes through me. I jam my hand into my jeans like I can strangle a ringtone. The screen shows Unknown Caller. My thumb hovers. I should block it without answering. I should walk to the manager and ask if there’s security who can walk me out. I should call Tommy.
Do I do any of that? No. Like a fool, I swipe.
“Hello?”
Silence. Then a smile I can hear. “Blue tank top. High pony. Tight jeans, cuffs rolled. White Chucks. You always looked best simple.”
The words turn my bones to ice. All the blood in my body sprints for the exits.
I turn slowly, like fast might give something away.
The store’s the store: old men debating bacon brands like politics, a little girl asking her dad if we can get the cookies with the sprinkles, a young mom letting her toddler touch every single box of cereal because choosing is power.
No one close enough to say that to my ear without me seeing it.
“How’s the scar?” the voice asks. “Still a line under your collarbone? I didn’t put that one there. Still pisses me off.”
My stomach lurches. I picture my sling, Tommy’s hands steady, Doc Kelly’s voice, the smell of antiseptic. I picture the shower last night, how hot I made it, how red my skin went.
“Who are you?” I hate how small I sound.
A chuckle. Soft. Intimate. “We both know who I am. You could find me if you wanted, baby. But you always have liked to play games.”
I stab the red button, hands shaking hard enough that the phone nearly slips from my fingers. It buzzes again immediately. New number. I decline. Again. Decline. Again. Decline.
The hum overhead gets louder, or my heartbeat does, or both.
I put the basket on the floor because I don’t trust my grip and I squat, right there by the eggs, because my knees don’t belong to me, not for a second.
I draw a breath in like I’m on the bottom of a pool and count it out.
One to four, hold four, out to four. Head Case taught me that; so did rehab, so did Crunch when he sat on the porch steps with me once and breathed with me while the world pounded inside my throat.
A cart wheel squeaks behind me. “You okay, hon?” an older woman asks, bag of frozen peas in one hand, concern etched in her features.
I stand too fast, smile too bright. “Yeah,” I lie. “Just dizzy. Forgot to eat breakfast.”
She clucks and tells me about hypoglycemia and I nod and promise crackers. When she turns away, I yank my phone open and change it to airplane mode. It’s like slamming a door on a hand. The silence is immediate and total and I almost cry from relief.
“Get through the list,” I tell myself out loud. “One shelf at a time. Get through the list and go home.”
It works the way talking to yourself sometimes does.
I move mechanically: bread, pasta, canned tomatoes.
The store is bright and that helps. At the register I make a joke about bringing my own bags because it makes me feel like a saint, and the cashier laughs and calls me “green queen,” and I smile like a normal person with a normal brain.
The parking lot, though. My skin sizzles before my feet hit the line where tile turns to sidewalk.
I do the dumb thing—I look over my shoulder like the movie girl who’s about to get caught. There’s nobody looking at me. That’s the part that’s terrible. Whoever it is, he’s good at not being seen. Or he isn’t here at all and the call was a trick, a guess, a fishing expedition that got lucky.
The sun is high and punishing. It makes the asphalt sparkle.
I push the cart the cashier loaded my bags in faster than I need to, sling the bags into the trunk with more force than they deserve.
I should have just stuck with my basket.
The back of my neck prickles. I can feel eyes, I swear I can, but there are a hundred of them in a grocery lot and none with a red arrow above them saying it’s me, the bad guy is right here.
A shopping cart slams somewhere. I jump, curse, and laugh at myself to keep from shaking apart. I get in the car, lock it, sit for a beat with my hands at ten and two, and I make a decision I hate: I don’t tell Tommy.
Not because I think he’d be mad at me for getting scared.
Not because I don’t trust him to protect me.
Because I can see the consequences ripple out like oil in water.
He will go hunting. He will throw the pieces of our peace into a pile and light them if he thinks I’m in danger.
He will make calls of his own. He will put his body between me and the world in a way that costs him.
He will say it doesn’t, but I know the ledger of a man’s soul when he carries a woman like me.
I won’t do that to him unless I have proof. A face. A plate. A name I can write down that isn’t just a ghost calling.
“Coward,” a mean little voice whispers. “Liar.” I’m seriously going crazy. “Strategic,” I tell it back. “Adult.”
I pull out of the lot, scanning mirrors like a cop, like a thief, like both.
A white SUV follows me for two blocks and then turns.
A black pickup sits at the light and doesn’t move when I pass; it goes the other way.
A silver sedan pulls up behind me where our road narrows and stays there three miles.
I let it. At the turn for the compound, I go straight, then loop back around the long way, and when I come to our drive again, the sedan is gone.
I unload the groceries like a normal person having a normal day. I put the eggs in the fridge, the pasta in the cabinet. I stand in front of the sink and breathe. The house is quiet except for the tick of the kitchen clock. Which, if I were a superstitious woman, I’d say sounds like a heartbeat.
I take my phone off airplane, put it on Do Not Disturb with favorites break through only. I add Tommy, Jenni, Crunch, Doc Kelly, Head Case, Tank, Red. It’s a circle. If the past wants to get in, it’ll have to learn how to pick locks.
For the next hour, nothing happens. I text Jenni a photo of the ridiculous cereal I let myself buy because I was brave at the register, and she sends back a voice note that’s half cackle, half bring me some.
I wipe the counters that don’t need wiping.
I fold the towels that didn’t really need folding. I hum.
The phone buzzes in my back pocket.
I freeze.
Favorites only. It has to be one of them. I’m already smiling when I pull it out, already ready to say something cute about cereal to make Jenni laugh twice.
Unknown number.
The smile drops off my face. My thumb hovers. I don’t answer this time. I watch it buzz. It stops. Buzzes again. Stops. Again. A minute later, voicemail dings.
I don’t listen. Not right away. I put the phone face down on the counter like if I can’t see it light up, then it’s not. I rinse an apple. I bite it. The tartness makes my jaw ache. I chew and swallow and feel like a person trying to act like they don’t know there’s a bomb in the room.
“Fine,” I whisper to no one. “Fine.”
I put the voicemail on speaker and set the phone by the sink.
Silence. Then breath.
Then, in a voice like dirty velvet: “You smell like lemons and laundry soap. Blue tank. White shoes. Saw you at the eggs. Missed a crack. You always were careless.”
The call cuts. The room hums.
I grip the edge of the counter until my knuckles show. The world goes tight around the edges, white as the rim of a plate.
And then—I do nothing.
I don’t call Tommy. I don’t call Jenni. I don’t run. I stand in my kitchen and breathe because I refuse to let a ghost phone turn me back into a person who lives through a peephole.
“This is my house,” I say out loud, to the lemon cleaner beside the sink, to the crooked lampshade Tommy won’t fix because I love it even though I think it drives him crazy, to the coffee mug that says Sober is Sexy because Jenni has no chill. “You don’t get to be in here.”
I turn the phone off and slide it in the drawer with the potholders.
Then I put on music and start a sauce that takes three hours because it makes the house smell like something that gets better the longer it goes.
If the past wants a war, it can wait its turn.
Tommy comes home sweaty and happy, with dust on his forearms and a look that says he convinced a client to stop asking stupid questions and let him build the thing right.
I meet him at the door, kiss him long enough he forgets whatever punchline he came in with, and shove a spoon of sauce into his mouth when he tries to talk.
“Holy—” He blinks. “Marry me.”
“Language,” I admonish. When I first got out of rehab, talking about the future scared me.
Words like marry sent me into a spiral. I was living day to day, sometimes minute by minute to beat back cravings.
I couldn’t think ahead. So it has become our joke that future talks are worse than cuss words.
He laughs and tucks me under his arm and for ten whole minutes I don’t think about a voice that knows where my tattoo sits. We eat on the back steps again. He tells me we should go north this weekend, and I pretend to consider like it isn’t already my favorite direction.
“I’ll pack a bag,” I tease. “You bring the bacon.”
“Impossible to—”
“—overbuy it,” I finish with him, and he grins like this is our vow.
Night slides in easy. The phone stays off in a drawer. The world contracts to this: his hand on my knee, my head on his shoulder, the crickets yelling at each other in the hedges like they’re arguing about sports. When we go to bed, I’m tired in the good way again.
And still—when the house goes dark, the room goes quieter than the day ever does, a little voice scrapes its way up my throat. Tell him.
It isn’t the mean voice. It’s the one that’s saved me more times than I know by making me use my words before my brain convinces me to shut up to be small.
I roll toward him. “Tommy?”
“Mm?” He’s half-asleep already; it’s his superpower.
The words park behind my teeth, engines idling.
I picture the calls. The eggs. The way he will go still and quiet and then burn so hot he’ll melt the phone tower.
I picture Virginia, the way his eyes shine when he says north, the way he’s been vibrating around me like he ate a secret.
I picture our weekend of quiet together and decide to wait to share with him what’s happening.
“Do you want the green duffel or the black one?” I ask instead, being both coward and strategist in the same breath.
He smiles into the pillow. “Green,” he mumbles. “Matches your eyes.”
I watch him sleep. I promise myself if there’s another call—one more, just one—I’ll tell him. I’ll put the whole stupid mess on the table and let him help me.
I fall asleep to the sound of his breath, steady, indifferent to ghosts. My last thought before the dark takes me is an old one, from rehab, from the porch with Crunch, from Doc Kelly’s waiting room and Head Case’s breathing exercises:
You’re allowed to choose when to fight. You’re allowed to choose how.
Tomorrow I’ll choose again.
Tonight I choose this.
The bed. The man. The quiet that belongs to me.