Sadie
I stand with my hands on my hips and stare at the boxes. Only ten of them this time. The other four I had already unpacked and that stuff has either already been brought over, or I’ve not needed it.
The entire contents of my apartment were brought over by Lev and Dmitri in less than an hour while I waited here, because going back to that apartment was just something I couldn’t face.
I open the first one. Misc. is written on the side in black marker and my handwriting. It’s been so long since I packed them, I find myself wondering what I considered to be ‘misc.’ but important enough to drag across state lines.
I open the flaps and stuff from my childhood stares up at me.
My baby blanket, soft and worn in places.
A jewelry box that was a gift from my dad when I was six years old and making friendship bracelets to share amongst my friends.
The little ballerina doesn’t spin anymore, but the music still plays in that fragile, tinny way.
At the bottom of the box, underneath school work and a few knick-knacks, lies a photo album.
It's cheap. One of those drugstore albums with the plastic sleeves and the peel-back pages, the kind that sticks and crinkles when you turn them.
My mother started it when I was born and I took over when she got sick and I've been carrying it from apartment to apartment for years, the one thing I never left behind, the one thing Jason never touched because he didn't know it existed.
I kept it in the back of my closet, behind the winter coats, wrapped in a pillowcase.
I sit on the bed and open it.
The first page. My parents on their wedding day.
My father in a suit that's slightly too big in the shoulders, grinning at the camera.
My mother in a dress she sewed herself, cream-colored, simple, her dark hair pinned up in a way that's already coming loose.
They're standing on the steps of the courthouse, my father's hand on the small of her back, and she's leaning into him the way I lean into Nick, like instinct.
I touch the edge of the photograph. The plastic sleeve has yellowed. The colors have faded to that soft, warm palette that old photos develop, everything slightly golden, slightly unreal.
I turn the page. Me as a baby. Me at three, in the garden, holding a tomato in both hands, my face smeared with dirt. My mother crouching beside me, laughing. My father behind the camera, his shadow visible in the bottom corner.
More pages. Birthday parties. School photos with the bad haircuts and the forced smiles. The summer at the lake with my cousins, all of us sunburned and grinning, popsicle stains on our shirts.
And then, mixed in with the family photos, the other ones. The ones from before.
Me and Sarah Kowalski at junior prom, both of us in dresses we bought at the thrift store on Main Street, both of us convinced we looked like movie stars. Sarah with her red hair and her loud laugh and the way she'd call me at midnight to read me passages from whatever book she was into that week.
Me and Ruby Laiken at graduation, caps crooked, arms around each other's shoulders. Ruby, who sat next to me in biology and taught me how to play chess during lunch and drove me to the hospital the night my mother's breathing changed.
Me and Carly and Jess Navarro at the coffee shop on Fifth, sophomore year of community college. Carly, who was going to be a teacher. Jess, who was going to backpack through South America. Me, who was going to be a nurse.
I haven't talked to any of them in years.
Jason didn't forbid it. That wasn't how Jason worked.
He didn't issue orders. He created conditions.
A bad mood when I came home from coffee with Sarah.
A migraine, conveniently timed, the night Ruby invited me to her birthday.
A comment about Carly, nothing cruel, just pointed enough to make me second-guess the friendship.
She's kind of needy, don't you think? She calls you a lot.
I just want time with you, Sade. Is that so much to ask?
It wasn't much to ask. Each time, it wasn't much. A skipped coffee. A missed birthday. A text left on read because answering would mean explaining why I couldn’t be there.
One by one, the friendships thinned, and one morning I woke up in the apartment in Millbrook and realized I hadn't spoken to a single friend in seven months and the only person who called me was the man lying beside me who had messed with my insulin the night before.
I close the album. I press my palms flat against the cover and I sit with it.
I could call Sarah. I could find her number, or her social media, or just look up Kowalski in Millbrook and there she'd be.
I could explain. Not everything, not the insulin or the knife or the blood on the kitchen floor, but enough.
Enough to say I'm sorry. I disappeared. I wasn't well.
The man I was with made it hard to be anything to anyone else, and I let him, and by the time I realized what I'd lost, it felt too late to come back.
It felt too late. Past tense. Because sitting in this bedroom, with a diamond on my finger and a wedding dress in the guest room closet, it doesn't feel too late anymore.
It feels like exactly the kind of thing a woman does when she's starting over.
You open the boxes. You look at the photos.
And you decide which parts of the life you packed away are worth unpacking.
I put the album on the nightstand and walk down the hall to the guest room.
The dress is hanging over the closet. I know this because I've opened the garment bag four times today.
I told myself I was checking on it, making sure it was hanging properly, making sure the bag was zipped, making sure nothing had happened to it in the three hours since I last checked.
This is ridiculous. Nothing is going to happen to a dress in a zipped bag in a closed closet in a guarded house.
I know this, but I can’t stop myself.
I unzip it three inches, just enough to see the fabric.
Ivory. Silk. A simple cut, fitted through the bodice, a skirt that falls straight to the floor without volume or fuss.
Priya found it at a boutique in Wicker Park, a tiny shop run by a woman named Gemma who took one look at me and said, "You want something clean," and she pulled this off the rack.
Priya cried when I tried it on, and that was the end of the search.
I zip the bag closed. I press my hand against it for a moment. Then I close the closet.
The sadness is there. It's been there all day, running underneath the excitement like a bass note under a melody, low and steady.
I'm getting married in six days and my mother won't zip me into my dress and my father won't offer me his arm.
There will be no family in the front pew, just a space where they should be, and the space will be the loudest thing in the church.
But the sadness isn't all there is. Underneath it, or maybe beside it, is something else.
Something warm and stubborn and forward-facing.
The feeling of a woman who packed her life into boxes and opened them in a new house and found that the things inside them still fit, just in different places now.
I go looking for Nick.
He's in the study. The door is open three inches, which means he's working but not on anything that requires privacy.
I've learned the language of this house in the weeks I've lived here.
Closed door means Dmitri is inside and the conversation isn't for me.
Closed door but multiple voices means captains.
Open door means come in. Three inches means knock.
I knock.
"Come in."
He's behind the desk. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, pen in hand, a folder open in front of him.
The lamp is on, throwing that warm circle across the desktop that I've come to associate with him the way I associate the smell of antiseptic with the clinic.
He looks up and his face does the thing it does when he sees me, the slight recalibration, the sharpening of focus, as if everything else in his field of vision just dropped a level in priority.
"Hey," I say, closing the door behind me.
"Hey." He sets the pen down. "How’s the unpacking going?"
"Fine," but the twist in my chest tells me that it’s not so fine on a deeper level.
He watches my face. "Come here."
I cross the room. I walk around the desk to where he's sitting and he pushes the chair back. I step into the space between his knees and his hands go to my hips automatically. Thumbs on the bone, fingers wrapping around to the small of my back. The grip that says I know where you are.
"I found my old photo album," I say. "Pictures of my parents. My childhood. Friends from before Jason."
His thumbs move in small circles on my hips. He doesn't say anything. He waits.
"I think I want to reach out to some of them.
After the wedding. When things settle. There were people I loved, Nick.
Good people. I let Jason take them from me the way he took everything else, one piece at a time until I didn't notice the gaps anymore.
" I put my hands on his shoulders. "I don't want gaps anymore. "
"Then fill them."
Three words. The same economy he brings to everything. No lecture about healing, no caveats about being careful, no analysis of whether the friendships can be rebuilt. Just: do the thing you need to do.
"I looked at the dress again," I say.
"How many times today?"
"Five."
The corner of his mouth lifts. "Is it still there?"
"Yes." I push my fingers through his hair, enjoying the softness of it then lean down and press my lips against his.
It starts soft. The kind of kiss I give him in the morning over coffee, the kind that says I'm here, you're here, the day hasn't started yet. But his hands slide from my hips to my lower back and pull, and I step closer, and the angle changes, and the softness tips into something else.