Chapter 1 #3
I didn't care. I want that on the record too.
In that minute, with his arms around me, I did not care one single bit that Mrs. Whitcombe was going to tell everyone at the church potluck that she'd witnessed Josie Hart-Vale's dead husband return from beyond, complete with dramatic doorstep reunion.
Let her tell it. Let the whole town have their gossip.
I had two years of grief sitting inside my chest like a stone, and for one minute, one single suspended minute, the stone didn't weigh anything at all.
Then the minute ended, the way minutes do, and the questions came flooding back in like water through a broken dam, and I pulled back far enough to look at his face, really look at it, at the two years written into it in lines that hadn't been there before, and I said the only thing I had left.
"You have a lot of explaining to do."
"I know."
"A lot, Cormac."
"I know."
"I have a date Friday."
I don't know why that was the thing that came out.
Of everything — the funeral, the grief, the two years, the sheer physics-breaking impossibility of him standing in front of me — that was the sentence that fought its way to the front of the line, and I watched it land on his face like a physical blow, watched something in him brace against it and absorb it anyway, the way he'd absorbed my fists a minute before.
"Okay," he said, quiet.
"His name is Warren. He's kind. He's steady.
I was starting to think maybe I could—" My voice broke again, differently this time, grief and fury and something horribly, disloyally like joy all braided together so tight I couldn't tell which thread was which.
"I was starting to think maybe I could build something again. And now you're just — standing here."
"I know," he said, for the third time, and there was nothing else in his voice but that — no argument, no case being made for himself, no attempt to tell me my grief was inconvenient.
Just two years of a man absorbing whatever I had to give him and asking for nothing back.
"I don't have the right to ask you for anything, Josie.
I gave that up the day I let you bury an empty box.
I'm not here to ask you to undo two years like it didn't happen.
I'm here because I couldn't not come home, and because you deserved to know the truth even if the truth doesn't fix a single thing. "
I looked at him — really looked, in the last of the light, flour still on my hands, my whole carefully rebuilt life sitting on the floor of my shop in pieces around my feet — and something in me, something old and stubborn and apparently not as buried as I'd thought, recognized him completely.
Not the ghost. Him.
"You'd better come in," I said, "before I start hitting you again."
The corner of his mouth moved, the smallest, most familiar thing in the world, a ghost — God help me — of the smile I used to know. "Fair warning," he said. "I probably deserve it."
"You definitely deserve it."
"Can I still come in?"
I stepped back from the door, my whole body shaking, my whole life about to be rearranged for the second time in two years, and I let him in.
He moved through the shop like a man walking through a dream he wasn't sure he was allowed to be having, eyes catching on things — the new espresso machine, the corkboard of customer photos, the little chalkboard sign that said TODAY'S SPECIAL in handwriting that wasn't his and wasn't mine either, just the town's, just ordinary life continuing on without him in it.
I watched him take inventory of everything I'd built, and I watched something complicated move across his face doing it, and I didn't have the capacity, not yet, not that first night, to wonder what exactly he was feeling.
I was too busy trying to survive my own feelings to make room for his.
"Sit," I said, nodding at the little table by the window where I sometimes ate my lunch alone, and he sat, careful, like the chair might not hold the weight of a man who wasn't supposed to exist anymore.
I put the kettle on because my hands needed a task, because if I stood still one more second I thought I might simply come apart on the floor of my own shop, and I listened to the water start to climb toward a boil and thought, distantly, that this was the strangest ordinary thing I had ever done — making tea for a dead man in my kitchen on a Tuesday evening, my whole life balanced on the head of a pin.
"Josie," he said, from the table, quiet.
"Don't," I said, not turning around. "Don't say my name like that yet. I need one more minute before you say my name like that again."
He didn't say anything else. He just waited, the way I'd learn, over the coming weeks, that he'd become very good at doing — waiting, patient, absorbing whatever I needed to give him without asking for anything back.
I stood at the counter with my back to him and my hands shaking around the kettle, and somewhere behind me sat the impossible, resurrected shape of the life I thought I'd already finished grieving, and I understood, standing there, that nothing about the next several months was going to be simple.
I turned around anyway. I always did. That was, I was starting to realize, simply who I was now — a woman who turned around and faced the hard thing, every single time, because two years of grief had taught me I could survive facing things, even when facing them cost everything I had.
"Okay," I said. "Tell me everything."
And he did.