Chapter Twenty-Five #2
He kissed me again. It was sweet and tender. And felt like a promise. One neither of us was ready to verbalize.
Then he stepped away to go get his tools and to likely text his family to check on Chaos.
While he was gone, I fished the shelf out of my closet and grabbed the second one just like it. If he was willing to do one, why not have him do both?
Watching Marc hang a shelf was an experience I was entirely unprepared for.
He’d lined up everything on the bathroom counter with a precision that would have felt excessive if the result wasn’t so clearly going to be perfect—laser level, anchors, the right drill bit selected and set aside with the same focused attention he gave everything.
He pressed two fingers to the wall and made a mark with a pencil. Checked the level twice.
Then the drill started and something in my brain went offline and my body was an inferno of lust.
“Your sexiness just went up two points,” I announced.
He didn’t pause. “What was I at before?”
“A solid eight.”
He looked at me over his shoulder with a grin that did additional damage. “Then that makes me a ten. I’ll take it, Hart.”
I backed out of the doorway before I made a decision I’d regret before the shelves were finished. I had priorities.
The living room was safe territory. I stood for a moment in the middle of it, taking in the particular late-night quality of the apartment. Then I went to my suitcase to throw clothes together for later.
I unzipped it. Reached for my favorite sundress. And stopped.
My hand stilled on the fabric.
The suitcase sat in the middle of the living room floor like it had since I’d arrived.
I’d been living out of it for months, pulling things out and putting them back, navigating around it in the morning.
I’d told myself it was practical. That it made sense to keep things consolidated when the closet was full and the bedroom closed and everything was …
The bedroom was right there.
Down the short hallway. Door closed. The same way it had been since mid August when I’d come back for her funeral, stood in the doorway, and couldn’t make myself go in.
Aunt Jem’s life was still in that room. Her reading glasses were probably still on the nightstand. Her robe was likely still on the hook behind the door. Everything exactly where she left it because she hadn’t known she was leaving.
The thought arrived without warning.
I always thought we had more time.
Why didn’t we have more time?
I didn’t know how to fully live my life without the one person who made me feel whole. The one person who made me feel seen. The one person who thought I was enough just as I was.
The tears came before I could brace for them.
Unable to hold myself up, I pressed against the wall.
A sob racked my body as my legs gave out.
I slid down the flat surface, instinctively pulling my knees to my chest because it was the only thing my body knew how to do.
A hollowness deep within my soul, that had formed the day I walked into this apartment, with that suitcase and refused to enter her room, split wide open.
My hands clutched my stomach where this unbearable pain had settled beneath my ribs.
A whimper escaped my lips as my heart cracked in half once again.
It was like reliving the news that she’d passed.
I barely survived that the first time, and now it was like it was happening all over again.
The emotions I’d told myself I’d dealt with.
That sorrow that lived in my bones had not been buried deep enough, and tonight they burst forth from beneath the rubble of my denial, my anguish, my anger at her being gone.
Tears tracked down my cheeks faster than I could brush them away.
I was on the floor crying over a suitcase. And I couldn’t stop.
I could practically hear Aunt Jem’s voice in my ear: It’s time sweetheart.
It should’ve been comforting, but no amount of comfort could make what lay beyond that door okay.
The drill went silent. I should’ve checked in with Marc, but my muscles stopped working.
“Hey I finished—Delaney!”
The clatter of something hitting the tile registered.
Then he was across the room on the floor next to me, and I was in his arms. He embraced me, my face tucked into the hollow of his throat, his hand making long strokes up and down my back.
“Hey, I’ve got you. Take a breath.” His voice reached me through the panic.
I held on to it, let it anchor me, my breathing catching his rhythm. “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head. “I’m f-fine.”
His hand kept moving, tracing my spine—slow, never stopping. “You’re not fine. Tell me.”
I traced an abstract pattern with my fingertip across his shirt. The soft fabric soothed me just as much as his body heat enveloped me in its warmth.
The words didn’t come in order. They came out wrong—fragmented, out of order, slipping through my hands faster than I could hold onto them. My voice halted, my throat squeezed, as I forced out the words to address the grief I’d been holding at arm’s length for far too long.
The suitcase.
The closed door.
The way I’d been here for months and still avoided certain parts of the apartment, like they might reject me if I stepped too far inside. Like I was borrowing space that wasn’t mine. Like I hadn’t earned the right to stay.
He listened without trying to fill the gaps. His hand kept moving on my back, slow and even, and I focused on that while I found words for things I hadn’t said to anyone.
"I don’t know how to be here sometimes. I’ve been here for months, and I still don’t know how to live in this place.”
He tucked my head beneath his chin. His heartbeat was steady against my cheek. “Tell me about her.”
“She always liked you, you know. Back when I thought you were insufferable. It used to make me furious.”
The low sound he made, something between a laugh and an exhale, was the kind I wished I could bottle up to keep accessible for the hard days.
“And she read everything.” I went on. The words were starting to come easier.
“Nonfiction. Fiction. Anything. And she kept books in every room. She had this system for organizing them that made complete sense when she explained it to me and that I’ve never been able to reconstruct.
I tried after she died, and got so frustrated I packed up half of them and put them in the second small room.
” I sniffed. “Maybe I was too hasty packing things up. But it hurt to look at them.”
“That makes sense.”
I sniffled.
“How did she get into this type of work?” he asked.
“She believed in all of it,” I said. “The card readings, energy work, crystal healing, astrology, Human Design, and the idea that people come into your life for reasons that aren’t always visible yet.
And with the same matter-of-fact certainty that people believe in the stars in our sky, she believed all of these things. They were just facts.”
He stayed. Listening, without an agenda, without preparing what he’d say next.
“When she was about eight years old, she was in the shower and raised her arms up high, and something grabbed her wrists and wouldn’t let go.
” I felt him still. “She pulled, and it took a few tries before it released her. She said at first it scared her. But then she realized she could sometimes see people that weren’t physically in the room, or feel them.
Not always. Sometimes it was just a sensation, but she knew early on there was more to this world than what most people let themselves look at. ”
“Can you?” His voice was genuinely curious.
“Not like she could. She always said I had the ability, but I never really worked on it like I should have with her.” An ache settled in my stomach. “I always thought we had more time.”
The words settled between us, and I appreciated that Marc didn’t rush to fill the silence. We both let it be for a long while. Long enough for me to live in the good moments we’d discussed and not stay buried beneath my grief.
“She had a way of drawing people to her,” Marc said softly, after a while. “I remember that. Even just passing her on the street.”
“Everyone did. Her shop did so well because of it. People came in for crystals or a card reading and left feeling like they’d known her for years.” My throat tightened. “Some days I just want to call her. Ask her what tea I should be making. Tell her about—” I stopped.
“About us,” he said. Not a question.
“She’d have something to say about it,” I said. “She always had something to say. Usually something annoyingly accurate.”
“Glamma and she were close,” he said. “She might have stories. Things she’d want you to know.”
Something in my chest eased slightly at that. The idea of Aunt Jem existing in someone else’s memory and with someone I could actually sit with and ask. “I’d like that.”
He held me through the inner turmoil that followed.
“I keep thinking she’s going to come back,” I finally admitted.
The thing I hadn’t said to anyone. “I know she’s not.
Logically, I understand that, but I can’t make my body believe it.
And as long as my body doesn’t believe it, I can’t get rid of any of her stuff because if I do, it means I’ve admitted—” My voice frayed at the edges.
“If I go through her things and make space for myself, it means I’m accepting she’s gone.
That I’ll never walk in here and hear her voice or smell her cooking or —” I pressed a fist to my chest. “She was my person and without her I don’t always know how to—”
“You have me.”
Three words. That meant everything.
“I know I’m not what she was to you and I won’t try to be,” he continued.
“But you’re not alone in this. You have me.
You have Cheryl. You have Adele.” He kissed the top of my head.
“And going through her things. It’s not giving up on her.
That’s not closing the door.” His arms tightened.
“That’s the part of grief no one warns you about.
That sometimes the physical things hurt as much as the loss did.
That letting go of objects can feel like losing the person again even when you know you’re not. ”
I pressed my face into his chest.
He got it.
“Thank you,” I managed to get out.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
We stayed on the floor. His back against the wall, my side against his chest, the apartment hushed around us.
After a while his voice came, low and even. “What would help? Something small. Something we can do right now while I’m here.”
I looked at the suitcase.
Aunt Jem’s voice arrived with the clarity it sometimes had—not a sound exactly, more the certainty of what she would say if she was standing in this room. Unpack, sweetheart. This is your home now. Act like it.
She would’ve hated the suitcase. She’d made such a big deal about unpacking my things when I arrived each summer. Like I was moving in permanently, even though we knew it wasn’t true.
“The closet,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Her clothes are still in there, and I have nowhere to put mine. She’d hate that I’ve been living out of a bag for months.”
“Show me,” he whispered right back. “We’ll do it together.”