25. Victoria
VICTORIA
Everything moved in snippets.
Sometimes I felt something cool pouring down the back of my throat. Other times something warm and salty prodded against my lips. The taste of carrot. Something warm descending over my shoulders. Light, and then no light. Wind, and then no wind. Rain, and then no rain.
Everything moved in still life images. Like a picture book from hell.
It always stormed on the date of my late husband’s death. I remembered thinking that specifically, at some point during the blur of it. What an appropriate day.
The sky knew to mourn with us. It always had.
I lost count of time somewhere in the first day.
That happened sometimes, on this day. The world went gauzy and distant and my body simply refused to participate in the forward motion of things.
I’d learned not to fight it. Fighting it only made it worse, made the grief dig in harder, made the days after longer and darker than they needed to be.
So I stopped fighting it years ago. I just let it take what it needed and waited for it to give me back to myself.
What was different this year was the arm around my waist.
Every time I surfaced even partially, it was there.
Steady and warm and present without demanding anything from me.
Sometimes I heard his voice, low and unhurried, saying something I couldn’t quite make out.
Sometimes I felt the cool edge of a glass against my lips and I drank without opening my eyes.
Once I woke up fully enough to realize he was reading something on his phone with one arm still wrapped around me, not going anywhere, not waiting for me to be better, just there.
I’d grieved every anniversary of Ryan’s death alone.
Every single one.
I hadn’t realized how heavy that was until it wasn’t.
I surfaced slowly.
The storm outside had quieted to a low rumble, rain tapping against the blackout curtains in an uneven rhythm. The television was on somewhere in the room, the Golden Girls laugh track drifting through the dark like something familiar I hadn’t earned yet. I blinked at the ceiling. Once. Twice.
A strong arm was wrapped around my waist.
I didn’t move. I just lay there and let my brain catch up to my body, clocking the weight of him behind me. The steadiness of his breathing. The particular warmth of someone who had been there long enough that the sheets had gone warm around both of us.
He was still here.
I didn’t know why that surprised me. It shouldn’t have. But it did.
“Hey,” I said. My voice came out rough and mostly gone.
Rhett shifted behind me. “Hey yourself.”
“What day is it?”
“Big game’s tomorrow.”
I closed my eyes. Opened them again. “I’ve been out that long?”
“On and off.” His hand moved slowly up and down my arm. “You’re okay.”
I wasn’t sure that was entirely true. But I didn’t argue with him.
Outside the rain picked up again briefly and then stopped. The Golden Girls laugh track filled the silence. I stared at the wall and breathed and let the room be exactly what it was. Dark and warm and quiet and real.
The next time my eyes opened and stayed open, I heard water running.
I registered being lifted before I registered anything else. The warmth of his arms. The cool air of the room hitting my skin as the blankets fell away. I didn’t fight it. I just tucked my face against his shoulder and let him carry me.
He set me on the bathroom counter. Slid my robe off my shoulders. Gathered my nightgown and pulled it over my head. I sat there blinking in the bathroom light while the shower ran hot behind him, steam already curling toward the ceiling.
He helped me in.
Not into the standing shower. Into his lap, his back against the tile, the rainfall shower head soaking us both. I felt myself exhale for what might have been the first time in days. My head fell back against his shoulder. My eyes closed.
He started with the washcloth.
Long, slow circles against my back. Patient and unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do and this was simply what the morning was for. I felt the knots in my shoulders start to give way under his hands one by one. I felt my jaw unclench.
He knew what he was doing.
That was the thing that moved through me as his hands worked their way across my shoulder blades.
Not surprise. Not the sudden ambush of grief I’d been bracing for without knowing I was bracing.
He had done this before. He knew the way I carried tension in my upper back, the particular knot that lived just left of my spine, the way my shoulders didn’t come down all the way unless someone made them.
He knew because he had learned me, the same way he learned everything, quietly, without asking permission, without announcing that he was paying attention.
He was always paying attention.
I thought about Ryan. I let myself, because it was his day and because I had learned that trying not to think about him only made the thoughts come harder.
I thought about Ryan and I thought about the fact that I had loved him for twenty-two years, that he had been the first person who made me feel like the sharpest version of myself instead of just the most manageable one, and that somewhere in the years since I lost him I had convinced myself that was it.
That was the one. That I had already had the thing most people never got at all, and asking for more was the kind of greed the universe didn’t forgive.
Rhett’s thumbs pressed into the base of my skull, slow and certain.
I hadn’t let anyone take care of me on this day.
Not once in fourteen years. Not Brynn, who always tried, who left flowers outside my door and sent texts and once, the year she was seventeen, sat outside my bedroom all night because she didn’t know what else to do.
I loved her for it. I kept her out anyway.
This grief was mine. Private. A room in my chest with the door locked from the inside.
Rhett had not asked me to unlock it.
He had simply waited until I ran out of reasons not to open it myself.
The tears, when they came, came differently than they had in the locker room.
Not one, not quiet. My eyes just filled and I let them, leaning the side of my face against the tile and feeling the hot water and his hands and the whole impossible weight of the day sitting somewhere above my sternum where I’d been keeping it since I woke up on the anniversary morning and remembered, the way I always remembered.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask if I was all right.
He already knew the answer. He just kept moving his hands in those slow circles until my shoulders finally came down from wherever they’d been holding themselves, and then he pulled me gently back against his chest and held me in the steam and the heat and let me cry without making me explain it.
Ryan would have known what to do with this man.
He would have recognized him immediately, the way he always recognized people who were worth keeping.
And he would have looked at me with that expression he got sometimes, the one that meant I told you so without him ever having told me anything at all, and then he would have been completely insufferable about it.
I let that thought land.
I let it stay.
I let him wash me. All of me. I lifted my arms when he asked. I turned when he needed me to. I let him tip my head back under the water and work the shampoo through my hair with both hands, his fingertips moving in slow circles against my scalp until I made a sound I didn’t plan on making.
He didn’t comment on it.
He just kept going.
It wasn’t until he went in for the second pass that I finally found my voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His hands paused. “For what?”
I moved my hand vaguely through the air. “This. All of it. Yesterday. Today.”
“Don’t.”
“Rhett—”
“I said don’t.” He tipped my head back under the water, rinsing the conditioner through with his fingers. “You don’t apologize for hurting. Not in here. Not with me.”
I stared up at the ceiling through the steam and the water and didn’t say anything else.
He switched out the blade on the straight razor before he touched me.
I noticed that. The care of it. He wasn’t rushing.
He wasn’t performing patience either. He was just present in the specific, deliberate way he was always present, like he’d made his decision about where he was going to be a long time ago and simply hadn’t left.
“Nice deep breaths,” he murmured when I tensed.
“Sorry.”
“No apologies.” His thumb moved in a slow circle. “Just breathe.”
I breathed.
By the time he was done I felt like a different person than the one who had sat in that corner chair staring at an empty bookcase. Not fixed. Not okay in any complete sense of the word. But present. Back inside my own body. Back inside my own life.
He shut off the water and stepped out first, coming back with towels before I had to ask.
I sat on the edge of the shower floor and let him dry me off and I looked at my legs, smooth now, and my arms, and I thought about fourteen years of showers that were functional things. Something to get through. Twelve minutes because there were places to be and things to run.
This had taken an hour at least.
I hadn’t counted.
“Rhett,” I said.
He looked up from where he was crouched in front of me, towel in hand.
“Thank you,” I said. “And before you tell me no thanks are necessary—” I held up a hand. “Let me say it anyway.”
He looked at me for a second. Then the corner of his mouth moved. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
He pressed his lips to my knee. Stood up. Offered me his hand.
I took it.
He helped me back to the bed. Pulled the covers back. Waited while I got in before he walked around to his side and slid in beside me.
The room was quiet. The storm had cleared out completely now and the light coming through the curtains had shifted from gray to pale morning light.
The Golden Girls episode had ended at some point and the television had gone to the next one automatically, the theme song playing softly from across the room.
I lay on my side facing him.
He lay on his side facing me.
Neither of us said anything for a minute.
“I owe you an apology,” I said finally.
“Victoria—”
“Not for these couple of days.” I shook my head. “For the years before it. For every time I looked the other way. For making you wait for something I already knew I wanted.” I held his gaze. “That wasn’t fair to you.”
He was quiet for a moment. His thumb moved across my knuckles.
“You needed the time,” he said simply.
“That doesn’t make it fair.”
“No,” he agreed. “But it makes it ours. And I’d do it again.” He paused. “Every single day of it.”
I looked at him. At the freckles across his nose that I hadn’t noticed for months and couldn’t stop noticing now. At the steadiness of him, lying here in the quiet of a room I’d designed for a life that never happened, filling up the space beside me like he’d always been meant to be in it.
“Big game’s tomorrow,” I said.
His mouth curved. “Yeah.”
“You should sleep.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moved.
“Rhett,” I said quietly.
“Yeah?”
I reached out and pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat steady beneath my hand. “I’m glad you turned left.”
He covered my hand with his. “Me too, Miss C.”
I closed my eyes.
For the first time in fourteen years, the anniversary of Ryan’s death didn’t end in silence.