Chapter 33
Lauren
Lauren was still in her pajamas when the knock came, startling her out of her focus.
She glanced at the clock. Too early for deliveries.
Outside, frost clung to the windows in delicate patterns, and the bare trees stood skeletal against a sky that couldn't decide between gray and blue.
Another knock.
Lauren pushed back from the coffee table. Her living room was a chaos of sketches, scraps of fabric and old craft magazines she’d been thumbing through.
At the front door, she peered through the peephole.
Tom.
Bundled in a dark coat, scarf looped high.
It was one she’d knitted years ago—one of her early attempts. He must have found it at her parents’ house.
It was chunky, a little uneven. Gray with flecks of green.
She wondered if he knew she’d knitted it. If he’d chosen it on purpose. If it meant anything.
Maybe he’d just been cold.
She opened the door a cautious few inches. “Tom.”
“Hi.” His voice puffed out white in the January air. “I want to take you somewhere.”
Her pulse jumped. Traitor. “Where?”
“A surprise,” he said, smiling a little. “Nothing fancy.”
For a second she forgot her pain. She saw the man she’d fallen in love with. The man who took her on dates. The man from their first apartment—the one who’d laughed with her over cheap pizza and helped her paint the bedroom yellow.
Her resolve wavered.
“Fine.” She opened the door wider, letting him in. “Give me five minutes.”
She left him standing in the doorway and hurried down the hall. She caught her reflection in the mirror and forced a steadier breath. No makeup, hair barely brushed. This wasn’t a date.
When she returned downstairs, Tom was in the kitchen. Doing her breakfast dishes.
The sight of him there—sleeves rolled, hands wet—was absurdly domestic. It shouldn’t have felt tender.
She grabbed her coat from the hook. She couldn’t forget that her marriage was built on nothing. That it was doomed from the start. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
He reached past her, his arm brushing her sleeve, close enough that she felt the heat of him, and pulled her scarf from the hook.
He wrapped it carefully around her neck.
This was the same man who thought her joy was childish. Who’d called the parts of her she treasured “cringe.” The softness didn’t erase the truth.
They stepped outside into the sting of winter. The world was quiet, the street muffled under layers of gray snow. Christmas lights still clung stubbornly to a few porches, glowing faintly in the pale morning.
Tom opened the passenger door for her, waiting until she was settled before circling to his side. Through the glass she watched his breath fog in the air.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he started the car.
“Somewhere I used to take you,” he said. “A long time ago.”
The engine hummed, the heater kicking in. They drove through the waking city—past houses that still bore traces of the holidays, past salt-streaked cars and shoveled sidewalks.
Lauren leaned her head against the window, trying not to think about how natural this felt. How dangerously easy it was to slip back into the rhythm of them.
“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” she admitted quietly, watching the landscape blur past.
Tom glanced at her, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I’m glad you did.”
Lauren stared at the building in front of them.
The laundromat.
Their laundromat. The coin-op on the corner where they'd spent every Sunday morning for two years, hauling bags of dirty clothes because their first apartment didn't have a washer or dryer.
"Tom." Her voice came out strange. "What are we doing here?"
He was already out of the car, popping the trunk. When she climbed out, the cold hit her face, but she barely felt it.
Tom pulled out his duffel—the same one she’d packed for him, she realized.
The laundromat door stood in front of them, frosted glass with faded lettering. Through it, she could see the same rows of machines, the same flickering fluorescent lights.
"I thought we could do laundry," he said. "Like we used to."
Her breath caught. "You drove across town to do laundry at a coin-op?"
"Yeah." He shouldered the bag.
Inside, the smell hit her first—detergent and dryer sheets and that particular industrial warmth that laundromats had. The machines hummed and clanked, a Sunday morning symphony she'd forgotten.
It was almost empty. An older woman folding towels in the corner. A college-aged guy asleep in a plastic chair, his phone clutched in his hand.
Tom headed for the machines along the back wall—their machines, the ones they'd always used because they were newer and less likely to eat your quarters. They were older now.
He set down his bag and started sorting. Whites. Colors. Darks.
Lauren watched him fumble with it, pulling out a shirt and hesitating over which pile it belonged in. He'd never been good at this part. She'd always been the one who sorted while he fed quarters into the machines.
"That's a light," she heard herself say, pointing to the gray shirt in his hand.
Tom looked at her. Looked at the shirt. Put it in the whites pile.
She moved closer, her hands reaching for the bag automatically. Muscle memory. This was what they'd done every Sunday—stood side by side at these machines, sorting and loading and waiting together.
Her fingers brushed his as they both reached for the same sock.
"You need quarters?" she asked.
Tom pulled out a handful of bills, and despite everything, Lauren almost smiled. He'd always forgotten quarters. Always had to ask the attendant for change while she stood there with exact coins already counted out.
The old attendant booth was gone now—replaced by a change machine bolted to the wall. She watched the way he smoothed the edges of the bills before feeding them into the slot. It spat out quarters in a noisy rush, clattering into the metal tray.
When he fed them into the washer, the familiar clink-clink-clink echoed through the room. The machines started up, water rushing in, the heavy drum beginning its slow rotation.
Tom stood there awkwardly, his empty laundry bag folded in his hands.
"Forty minutes," he said. "For the wash cycle."
She sank into one of the plastic chairs. Tom sat beside her, leaving one chair between them like a buffer.
The laundromat hummed around them. The machines sloshed and spun. The college kid's phone buzzed and he jerked awake, looked around confused, then slumped back.
Lauren stared at the machines, watching the clothes tumble together through the round glass door. His shirts. His jeans. His socks.
It used to be their clothes together.
“I forgot about this part,” Tom said quietly. “You used to bring a book.”
Lauren remembered. While Tom sat beside her and sketched in his notebook, designing buildings that didn't exist yet.
When had he stopped sketching his ideas?
"You used to draw," she said.
"Yeah." His voice was soft.
They sat in silence, the machines filling the space between them with sound.
Lauren thought about those Sundays. How mundane they'd been. How boring, even—sitting in a laundromat for hours, waiting for clothes to wash and dry. She'd complained about it sometimes. About not having a washer. About the time it took.
And then Tom had taken a job with his father. And used the money to build her a house with a laundry room. A beautiful house.
But now, sitting here beside Tom in the harsh fluorescent light, she realized those mornings had been precious in a way she hadn't understood. Just the two of them, with nowhere else to be. Nothing to do but wait together.
"Why did you bring me here?" Lauren asked.
Tom was quiet for a long moment. The machines sloshed. Someone else came in, hauling a bag almost bigger than they were.
“I loved this time with you," Tom said finally. “It was one of my favorite times of the week.”
Heat climbed the back of her neck.
"I remember you made a game of guessing which machines would break down. You were right more often than not."
Lauren stared at the machine in front of them. The one that used to leak during the spin cycle.
"I remember," Tom's voice cracked slightly, "how happy we were. Even doing laundry. Even in this shitty laundromat with broken machines and uncomfortable chairs."
Lauren closed her eyes.
The machines kept spinning. Lauren sat there, her hands twisted in her lap, and tried to breathe through the ache in her chest.
"We should walk," she said abruptly, standing. "While the machines run."
Tom stood too. “Okay."
They left the warmth of the laundromat and stepped back into the January cold, their breath clouding between them as they walked down the familiar street.