Chapter 6 Miles
Ifound my keys in the refrigerator on Monday.
Not near the refrigerator. Not on top of it.
Inside it, nestled between the milk carton and a block of cheddar cheese, like that was a perfectly reasonable place for them to live.
I stared at them for a long moment, the cold air raising goosebumps on my arms, trying to reconstruct how they'd gotten there.
Nothing. The memory was simply gone.
"Okay," I said aloud. "That's fine. People misplace things. It's normal."
It wasn't normal. I knew it wasn't normal.
"Shut up," I told myself, and grabbed the keys with fingers that had already started their morning tremor.
The week after the diner unraveled slowly, each day bringing fresh evidence that Dr. Patel's warning wasn't just a possibility.
It was my present tense. My elaborate, color-coded pill organizer was supposed to be foolproof: seven compartments, clear labels, a system even a deteriorating brain couldn't mess up.
"Did I take these already?" I asked myself, staring at the NOON compartment. It was empty. But had I taken them, or had I just forgotten to refill them last night?
The memory was a ghost. I reached for it, and my fingers closed on nothing.
"Think," I commanded myself. "Morning. Coffee. Pills in hand. Water glass."
Static. White noise where the memory should be.
I chose to skip the dose rather than risk doubling up.
By four o'clock, I was paying for that decision.
My right arm locked into a rigidity that turned picking up a coffee mug into an exercise in humiliation.
The tremor in my left hand became a violent shudder I couldn't suppress, no matter how hard I pressed it against my thigh.
"I’m alright," I announced to the empty living room, my voice cracking on the lie. "Everything is under control, I just need water."
Wednesday brought the phone call with the realtor, a woman with an aggressively cheerful voice who wanted to discuss staging options and timeline expectations.
"So, Mr. Cameron, once you've sorted the personal items, we can really highlight the original moldings in the living space, and—"
I was formulating a response. I had the words right there, a sensible question about timelines and market conditions. And then…
Gone.
Not drifted away. Deleted. One second the thought existed, the next there was only empty space, a void where my sentence used to be.
"Mr. Cameron? Are you still there?"
"I'm sorry," I managed, heat flooding my face. "Can you repeat that?"
The pause on her end was palpable. "Of course," she said, her cheer now tinged with something that sounded like concern. Or pity. Hard to tell the difference anymore.
By Saturday afternoon, I'd stopped pretending. I sat in the living room surrounded by my fortress of unopened boxes, wrapped in a blanket I hadn't washed in two weeks, not even attempting to be productive. I was just existing. Breathing in and out and waiting for something I couldn't name.
The doorbell rang.
"No," I mumbled to myself. I wasn’t in the mood for seeing anyone.
It rang again.
"Absolutely not." I pulled the blanket tighter.
Whoever it was, neighbor, delivery person, someone from the historical society wanting to talk about the house, I didn't have the energy.
I couldn't perform wellness today. Couldn't arrange my face into something socially acceptable or keep my hand steady long enough to sign for a package.
The third ring was longer, more insistent. Aggressive, even.
"For God's sake," I muttered, irritation finally cutting through the exhaustion.
I shoved the blanket aside and dragged myself to the door, fully prepared to deliver the coldest dismissal of my legal career. I didn't check the peephole. Just yanked the door open, my most unwelcoming expression firmly in place.
The words died in my throat.
Charlotte.
She stood on my porch in the afternoon sunlight, wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. In her hands, she held a glass casserole dish covered with a red-checkered cloth.
And she was smiling, the same genuine smile I remembered from high school, the one that had always made me feel like maybe the world wasn't entirely hostile after all.
"Charlotte?" My voice came out rougher than I intended. "What are you—"
"You didn't call," she said with a shy smile on her face. "So I came to you."
I stared at her, my brain struggling to process. Of all the people who could have been standing on my porch, she was simultaneously the last person I expected and the only person I wanted to see. The contradiction was giving me a mild headache.
"Charlotte," I finally managed. "You didn't have to—"
"I know." She lifted the dish slightly. "But I was in the neighborhood, and I remembered you probably haven't eaten anything that didn't come from a microwave in weeks.
So." She raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to invite me in, or should I just stand here holding lukewarm pasta until my arms give out? "
The guilt hit me like a wave. I'd ignored her for a week. Left her standing in a parking lot with nothing but a vague promise I hadn't kept. And here she was, bearing a casserole like some kind of small-town saint.
I should send her away. Every instinct screamed it. Protect her. Protect yourself. Don't let her see what you've become.
But I was so tired. And she was smiling. And the loneliness of the past week really did tear me down like a curse.
"Yeah," I said, stepping back. "Sorry. Come in."
She stepped into the foyer, and I watched her gaze sweep across the cardboard towers filling the living room. Her expression didn't change, but I saw her cataloguing: the dust, the chaos, the evidence of three months of paralysis.
"Wow," she said mildly. "You really went all out with the unpacking."
"It's a process."
"Mmm. A three-month process, from what I’ve heard." She set the casserole on the hall table and turned to face me, hands on her hips. "Miles. This is a lot of boxes."
"Astute observation. Very perceptive."
"Don't get smart with me. I'm holding your dinner hostage." She peered into the nearest open box. "Is this all your parents' stuff?"
"Most of it. Some from the attic, some from closets. I pulled it all down with the intention of sorting through it."
"And then?"
"And then I... didn't."
Charlotte nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something she'd suspected. "You need help."
"I'm managing."
"You're drowning." She said it without judgment, just stating a fact. "Let me help. One hour. A few boxes. It'll make you feel better."
Before I could argue, she'd already moved into the living room, pulling a stack of old sweaters from the nearest box. "Donate, keep, or toss?"
I stood frozen for a moment, caught between the urge to protest and the strange relief of having someone else make decisions. "Donate," I finally said.
"Good." She set them aside in what was apparently now a donation pile. "See? Not so hard. We'll have this place livable in no time."
"I wouldn't go that far."
"I absolutely would. I'm an optimist. It's a character flaw." She held up a truly hideous ceramic owl, its eyes bulging in perpetual surprise. "Please tell me this isn't a family heirloom."
"My grandmother's. She collected them."
"She collected nightmare fuel?"
There it was, her natural skill to make me laugh. If I wasn’t drowning in dread, I would’ve. "She had eclectic taste. There are about forty more in the attic."
"Forty." Charlotte's expression was perfectly horrified. "Miles. That's not a collection. That's an infestation."
"You should see the frog figurines."
"There are frog figurines?"
"A whole battalion. They have little top hats."
"Your grandmother was a menace."
"She really was." My laugh surprised me—rusty from disuse, but real. "She used to hide them around the house. My mother would open a cabinet, and there'd be a frog in a top hat staring at her."
Charlotte was laughing too, the sound warm and familiar. "That's genuinely unhinged. I love it."
We worked through the first box, then the second. She was efficient, decisive, moving through my paralysis with the practiced ease of someone who dealt with chaos professionally. We fell into a rhythm. She'd hold something up, I'd make the call, she'd sort it accordingly.
"Donate?"
"Keep."
"This lamp?"
"God, no. Toss."
"What about this?" She'd found a photo album, its leather cover worn soft with age. She opened it without asking permission, and I watched her face soften as she turned the pages.
"Oh my God." She held it up so I could see. "Is this you?"
My senior year soccer photo. Terrible haircut, cocky grin, the unearned confidence of someone who had no idea what life had in store.
"Unfortunately."
"You look so young."
"I was young. And significantly more certain about everything than I had any right to be."
"Some things don't change," she teased, but her voice was gentle.
She turned another page and stopped, her breath catching almost imperceptibly. I looked over her shoulder. It was a candid shot of the two of us at prom, caught mid-laugh about something I couldn't remember. Her dress had been green. I remembered that. Green like her eyes.
"We looked happy," I said quietly.
"We were happy." She looked up at me, and for a moment, fifteen years compressed into nothing. "Weren't we?"
"Yeah." My voice was a shaky whisper. "We were."
The moment stretched between us, fragile and charged. Then Charlotte cleared her throat and closed the album carefully.
"Keep pile," she said softly, and set it aside.
We moved into the dining room, then the kitchen. She was wrapping my mother's china in newspaper, her movements precise and careful. I watched her work, trying to find words for the gratitude stuck in my throat.
And then she noticed it.