Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
It was too hot in Phoenix.
It wasn’t a new observation, but it was a new point to add to the list of reasons she no longer thought of Arizona as home. Home was eight hundred miles north, probably two whiskeys deep, forgetting about her.
Hanna dropped her suitcase in the living room and looked around. Her sublet had cleared out and things were tidy, it was almost as if she'd never left. She walked through the house, mentally cataloguing all of the projects she still wanted to accomplish, and stopped in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Shit,” she whispered. She’d really cracked through rock bottom and discovered an entirely new subterranean city to explore.
She flopped onto her bed, the cicadas outside singing a dilapidated hymn, and pulled out her phone to fire off a text—the first item she needed to cross off of her very long to-do list.
* * *
It took everything in her to get out of bed and take a real shower, not just a passable one. Even with clean hair and a washed face, she barely looked like herself in the mirror.
She was just so tired.
For the first time, Hanna didn’t fuss with her makeup or hair to convince Olivia that she had her life together.
Instead, she pulled on the cleanest pair of leggings she had at her disposal and Milo’s flannel.
As she slid it over her head, she was back standing in his apartment, her suitcases packed, saying a tearful goodbye on the promise that she’d be back eventually.
For what, neither of them had an answer.
She threw her hair into a bun and found some sunglasses. While she may have been ready to let Olivia see her like that, she didn’t need her local barista to ask questions.
An iced coffee and a good cry in the car later, she sat on Olivia’s plush beige couch.
“So,” Olivia said, holding a pen to her lips. “This is the real Hanna.”
“What do you mean?”
“In all the time we’ve seen each other, you’ve only ever been perfectly put together.”
Of course, Olivia clocked that immediately.
“I didn’t have it in me today.”
“That’s okay! It wasn’t a criticism. I’m thrilled you’ve taken such a good step!”
Hanna scoffed, adjusting the cuff of his shirt around her wrist.
“This is what a good step looks like?’
“For you? Yes. Now, you want to tell me what happened?”
Hanna inhaled, letting the breath fill and expand all the places she hid her scary thoughts, forcing them to float to the top. The last time she’d seen Olivia was at the peak of her week in Milo’s home—god, she’d been so recklessly stupid.
Hanna talked a mile a minute, including all the sordid details that made her sob. She told Olivia about the bar, about the panic attacks, about the dinner she’d cooked for him. She told her about Vegas and Logan. She told her about how she’d cried in front of Milo.
When Hanna finally got to the final conversation they’d had on the plane, Olivia stopped her.
“Do you think he was right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do you think you’d burn him on your healing journey?
” She gave Hanna one of those looks, “Hey, you dumb bitch, you better have a big breakthrough here or you’re wasting two hundred bucks!
” and Hanna stared at the coffee table in front of her, filled with self-help books that she probably needed to read.
“No.”
“All the therapy in the world can’t make a man unafraid of love, Hanna.”
Hanna rolled her eyes, but really only at herself.
“I should have pushed.”
“Well, you had a good point too. You have unfinished business with a lot of pieces of your life. You won’t have room for something new until you handle them.”
“Damn, Olivia.” Hanna recoiled a little. Didn’t she pay her to make her feel better?
“I know, the truth can be a little painful sometimes. But in all the time we’ve been talking, you’ve had a pattern of immediately backing away from anything that pushes too hard on your emotions. I think that’s what happened here.”
“I mean, yes. That’s true. But like, what else am I supposed to do? Just keep letting people hurt me? It’s been a hell of a year for that. Shouldn’t I be avoiding things that are only going to make it harder to keep my head above water?”
“I know it feels like that,” Olivia said softly. She said everything softly, even when she was landing a lethal dose of observation. “But we don’t get to choose what happens to us. We only get to choose what we do about it.”
“God, that sucks.”
Olivia smiled, and for the first time in a few weeks, Hanna did too.
“What do you think your mom would have done?”
Hanna flinched. She hated that question. Mostly because, while the answer always came to her quickly, she was never sure if it was truly what her mom would have done, or if it was projection. There was a grief between those layers all their own.
“She would have never been in this mess to begin with,” Hanna laughed. Lisa hadn’t had patience for men in general.
Olivia tilted her head. “You said he was close with his mom. Do you think that was a blocker for you?”
"With him, it never felt like a big deal in relation to my mom because I know he gets it.
It would have been the same if I had introduced him to my dad, you know?
I don't know. Maybe there's a part of me that saw how close he is with his family and I was afraid to fall in love with, and potentially lose, even more people. "
“Mmm,” she said, which was Olivia for say more about that.
Hanna frowned. “Maybe I’m afraid it feels like cheating on my mom. A little.”
“And if you were to find a maternal relationship like that, what’s the worst that might happen?”
The tears stung. She couldn’t say it.
“Everyone leaves,” she whispered.
“You've endured a lot of trauma and a lot of abandonment over the last year, Hanna. What I often see with clients like you is that the story becomes about how you deserve these things to happen, almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does that make sense?”
Hanna sat with that for a moment.
And another moment.
And on the third moment, the one that really sold it, she cried harder than she’d ever cried in her entire life.
She cried so hard, in fact, that Olivia canceled her next session and let Hanna babble at her for another hour, soaking through every last tissue in the office.
She cried about her dad. She cried about her mom.
She cried about an unfortunate haircut in high school that she’d gotten teased about for weeks. She cried about Logan. A lot.
And Milo even more.
And when she was done crying about all of them, she cried about herself, because—as Olivia had pointed out—she deserved the same amount of mourning as everyone else.
And when she finally ran out of people to cry about, she felt like a different person—empty, but in a relieving way.
“You’ve been holding onto that for a long time,” Olivia said when she felt Hanna had safely wound herself to a stopping point.
“I guess so.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, for starters, I’m going to hydrate.”
Olivia didn’t laugh, but she blinked, signaling that she was not going to let Hanna sweep anything under the rug with a joke.
“I have some calls to make, I think.”
“Let’s reschedule again for next week?”
She could tell Olivia was never going to let her out of her sight again.
Hanna agreed and left the office, deciding to stop at the hardware store on the way home.
It was time for her to get to work.
* * *
“What about the emerald?” Cami asked, holding up a patterned tile beneath a myriad of lighting fixtures. “With the bronze hardware?”
“Oh,” Hanna said, taking the tile from Cami’s hands. She sipped on her iced coffee, trying to ignore the pang in her chest as she assessed how far off the shade of green was from a pair of eyes she’d spent a good amount of time not thinking about. “I love it.”
“Let me see the faucets again,” Cami said, slipping her reading glasses on. It was a move Hanna recognized, one her mother would have done too. She took a deep breath, letting the moment hurt and then pass.
Hanna swiped through the photos she'd collected in her camera roll as the shipments had arrived and found the section dedicated to bathroom fixtures. She handed the phone to Cami who held it up to a few other tile samples and clicked her tongue.
“I think it’s the emerald,” Cami reaffirmed. “Oh! Sara’s calling.”
“You can answer it,” Hanna said, squatting to the bottom shelf and reading the labels on buckets of grout.
“Hola, mi amor!”
“Mom?” Sara asked over the speaker. Cami held the phone closer to Hanna.
“Hi! Your mom is helping me pick out tile for my bathroom!”
“So you do know how to answer calls,” Sara quipped. Hanna took the phone from Cami.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
Sara laughed, a gentle reassurance that she understood.
“I was just calling to confirm your flight details for the wedding. The itinerary you sent doesn’t have a return flight.”
Hanna drew in a slow breath. “It doesn’t?”
“Maybe you only sent the first half?”
“Maybe,” Hanna said. “I’ll check and send you the rest of the info when I’m home! Your mom and I have big plans with a bucket of grout.”
“Is it pathetic that I’m actually jealous?”
Hanna laughed as Cami wiggled a black and white patterned tile at her. Hanna shook her head and pointed back at the emerald they’d started with.
“You should be, we’re having the best time. Berty might even bring the weed whacker over later, and then it’s a real party.”
“Good, you two need to be supervised.”
Hanna smiled. “FaceTime date next week?”
“Really?”
Hanna tried not to flinch at the excitement in her voice. She’d been too quiet since she’d been home.
“Yeah! Text me your availability. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“We do,” Sara said. “Hey, Hanna?”
“Yeah?”
“Hug my mom for me.”
“Deal,” she said. She hung up the call and pushed her phone back into her purse.
“She doesn’t know you’re putting the house on the market?”
Hanna swirled her coffee, watered down in the late summer heat.
“I didn’t want to excite her just yet. I could still chicken out.”
Cami wrapped an arm around Hanna’s shoulders.
“Lisa didn’t raise a chicken.”
* * *
Lisa did not raise a chicken, but she did raise a girl who, at the end of the day, was pretty bad at grouting tile, but not too bad at interior design.
She agreed to a tacit ceasefire with the sponge and set it in a bucket, wiping her brow as she admired her work.
It was only one of the two bathrooms, but it was progress. She still had flooring to install in her kitchen, cabinets to paint, and a few windows to replace, but her list got shorter with each passing day.
Hanna reached for her phone as she fell back on the cool tile floor.
Sara
Wednesday, 3PM. I want the full story, top to bottom.
I feel like I only caught a third of what was happening.
Hanna
It’s not that interesting. You got the good stuff.
Sara
I want notes. Diagrams. Screenshots.
Receipts, woman.
Hanna
Does it count as a wedding present?
Sara
Throw in a gravy boat and you’ve got yourself a deal.
Hanna
I’ll craft you one myself.
I’m a handy lady these days.
She snapped a photo of herself sprawled out on the floor, surrounded by buckets and stacks of tiles.
Sara
My mom said you seemed to be doing a lot better.
Hanna
I’m a very brave girl.
Sara sent a photo back, sitting in the middle of her living room, which was filled with small bags as she assembled wedding favors. The edge of a foot caught Hanna’s eye, a shoe she recognized.
He was sitting right there.
And all at once, she was acutely aware that she had not fixed things, she’d only patched over them.