2. Sophie
Sophie
Idrive home on autopilot.
Straight through the four-way stop where the hardware store used to be.
My Honda rattles over the railroad tracks on Jefferson and I don't flinch.
That rattle is just part of the car now, like the crack in the windshield and the way the AC only works on the highest setting, which I choose to interpret as character rather than neglect.
My hands grip the steering wheel tighter than they need to.
Grant Guilligan is back in Copper Falls.
I spend the next eight minutes in traffic successfully not thinking about him, which I celebrate by thinking about him exclusively. Six-foot-three, silver in his dark hair, those hazel-green eyes that look at you like he sees your soul.
We sat on opposite ends of Patty's couch eating chicken salad sandwiches and pretending the air between us wasn't doing something I don't have a clinical term for. He walked me to my car. Offered to coordinate Patty's care.
I pull into my apartment complex and park next to the dumpster, which is where I've been assigned and also possibly where I belong right now.
The stairs feel steeper than usual. I'm already exhausted, and my shift doesn't start for another five hours. I should sleep. I need to sleep. Twelve-hour night shifts are brutal on a good day, let alone a day where your ex-husband's older brother shows up looking like that.
Inside, I drop my purse by the door and kick off my shoes.
I should go directly to bed. I am going to go directly to bed.
I end up in the kitchen making toast instead, at three-fifteen in the afternoon, standing at the counter in my work clothes because I forgot to change. Two pieces of sourdough. Peanut butter. This is what my life looks like when I am spiraling in a completely low-key, totally managed way.
My therapist would have thoughts. Several of them, probably.
I eat the toast and try not to think about the way Grant stood on that porch.
The way he shifted to let me pass and I caught his scent and I've been haunted by that for approximately forty-five minutes.
Five years of successfully not thinking about someone and then one afternoon on his mother's porch and here I am, twenty-eight years old, spiraling.
And underneath that, there's the other thing sitting in my chest that I'm actively not looking at, which is Patty announcing over chicken salad, casual as weather, that she called my mother back in February.
That my mother had a work thing. That my mother, given a direct invitation to show up for her only daughter during the worst month of a cancer scare, chose Arizona over a phone call.
I knew that already, obviously. I was the one who found out first — a single text, can't make it hon, big week here, tell Patty I'm thinking of her, sent to me instead of to Patty, like even the excuse needed a middleman.
I just didn't know Patty knew. And I definitely didn't know Patty was going to say it out loud at a table with Grant sitting right there, watching me shut the conversation down in under four seconds like I've had practice, because I've been closing that particular door efficiently since I was sixteen years old and my father moved to Florida with a woman my age plus six and never once looked back to check if the door was actually shut behind him.
It's fine. I don't need it not to be fine. I built a whole life out of people who don't stay being background noise instead of a crisis — Patty stays, the clinic stays, and I don't need Grant Guilligan's assessment of my mother added to the pile of things I'm managing today.
I set down the plate. Look at the succulent on my windowsill.
It's a small thing — I got it at the grocery store because the care instructions said "thrives on neglect" and that felt relatable.
It's doing fine, actually. Better than fine.
It sits there in its little terracotta pot looking self-satisfied, and I think: good for you. Someone around here should be thriving.
I bought it the week after the divorce was finalized. Just stuck it on the sill and mostly forgot about it. The fact that it's still alive feels vaguely meaningful in a way I'm not examining too closely right now.
I rinse my plate and go to bed.
Close my eyes. Try the breathing technique from therapy. In for four, hold for four, out for four.
My brain, very helpfully, serves up the wedding.
Cooper's Barn reception hall. September. I'm twenty-three years old and four hours married to Chris Guilligan.
The DJ plays "Unchained Melody." Chris is nowhere. Someone said bathroom. Someone else said outside with his friends. I'm standing alone in my dress watching other couples sway, feeling stupid in the specific way you feel stupid when you're the bride and you're alone at your own wedding reception.
Then Grant appears.
"Dance with me." Not a question. An offer. His hand settles on my waist. We start moving.
He's thirty-eight. Fifteen years older. I barely know him — he flew in two days ago from somewhere overseas, showed up to the rehearsal dinner jet-lagged and quiet, said exactly as many words as the situation required and not one more.
Chris talks about his brother sometimes, always with this particular mix of resentment and awe that I recognized even then as a sign.
But right now Grant's here. And he's looking at me like I'm not the abandoned bride.
"You look beautiful," he says.
"Thank you."
"Chris is an idiot."
I laugh. Can't help it. "He's your brother."
"Doesn't make it less true."
We dance. He's good at it — confident lead, the kind where you don't have to think about where your feet go. His hand on my waist is warm through the fabric of my dress.
"Where are you living now?" I ask, because the silence is getting heavy.
"Baghdad. Infrastructure contract."
"That sounds dangerous."
"It can be." He spins me gently, catches me easily. "Someone has to build the roads."
The song builds. We're closer than we were at the start. I can feel the warmth of him. His jaw is tight. There's a tension in his shoulders that wasn't there at the beginning of the song.
"Sophie." His voice is low. Rough.
"Yeah?"
"Congratulations. On the marriage." He says it like each word costs something. "I hope Chris makes you happy."
"Thank you."
There's something in his eyes. Something that makes my stomach drop and my skin feel too tight and a voice in the back of my head saying this is wrong, you're married, you just said vows three hours ago—
The song ends.
Grant steps back. Drops his hands. His face goes carefully blank.
"Enjoy your night," he says.
Then he walks away. And he keeps walking — out of the reception, out of the building, and apparently straight to O'Hare because he's gone by morning.
Chris reappears twenty minutes later, drunk and apologetic in a way that's just slightly off, like an impression of an apology rather than the real thing.
I dance with my husband and try not to notice the difference.
I open my eyes. Stare at the ceiling.
That was five years ago. Five entire years. I was twenty-three and certain and so sure I was in love with Chris Guilligan that I missed every single flag waving at me.
Chris, who disappeared during our first dance.
Chris, who always had a reason we couldn't start a family yet. Important work. Bad timing. Maybe next year.
Chris, who moved to Denver six months after I asked for a divorce and hasn't called his mother once during her cancer treatment. Not once.
And Grant, who flew in from wherever he was, danced with me when no one else would, and then did the one thing that would've been a kindness even if it didn't feel like it: he left.
It occurs to me, lying here at four in the afternoon with my body exhausted and my brain unwilling to cooperate, that I could draw a very tidy little chart of every person who's ever mattered to me sorted into two columns — stays and leaves — and the leaves column would be depressingly full for a twenty-eight-year-old who thinks of herself as reasonably good at picking people.
My father, who traded Copper Falls for Florida and a younger family before I finished high school.
My mother, who finds time to call to mention, gently, that I really should think about moving somewhere with better opportunities, as if the problem has ever once been geography.
Chris, obviously. An entire column of people who looked at the option of staying and picked something else instead, every single time, and I built an entire personality out of not needing them to.
The stays column has exactly one name in it that isn't a coworker or a plant, and it's a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a purple headscarf who isn't even technically related to me anymore, not since the divorce went through.
I check my phone. Three-fifty. If I fall asleep right now I might get ninety minutes before I need to start getting ready.
I close my eyes. Open them again. Look at the ceiling some more.
The ceiling has a water stain in one corner that I've been meaning to report to the building manager for four months. It looks vaguely like a map of the British Isles. This is what I'm thinking about at three-fifty in the afternoon instead of sleeping. This is my life.
I throw off the covers and go back to the kitchen.
The succulent is still there on the windowsill, still smug, still thriving on my neglect. I give it a small nod of acknowledgment. We have an understanding, the succulent and I.
My phone buzzes. Patty.
I pick it up, already smiling because Patty texts like she talks — direct, efficient, slightly plotting.
Patty: How was your nap, honey?
Me: Great! Very restful.
I am going to hell for lying to this woman.
There's a part of me that wants to text back something about the lunch — why would you say that about my mom in front of him — but I don't, because Patty doesn't apologize for things she doesn't consider wrong, and because some tiny, traitorous part of me is almost grateful somebody finally said it out loud where a witness could hear.
Me: Tell him to get some rest. Long trip.
Patty: You too, honey. 7:30 the day after tomorrow. Don't be late.