Chapter 7
Josie
The house smelled like dust and time when Cormac opened the door, that particular stale-sweet smell of a place that's been holding its breath, and for one unsteady second I almost turned around.
I stood on the threshold a moment longer than I meant to, one hand braced against the doorframe, feeling the weight of everything this house held.
Our first apartment furniture, upgraded piece by piece over the years.
The kitchen table where he'd proposed, badly, dropping the ring box on the floor and having to crawl under the table to retrieve it while I laughed so hard I could barely say yes.
The hallway where we'd painted a height chart for a future we hadn't gotten to yet, a scribbled pencil line at four feet that belonged to nobody, just a hopeful mark we'd made one drunk anniversary, joking about children we might have someday.
All of it sat inside these walls, waiting, patient, the way the whole house had waited.
Then Cormac reached past me and flipped the hall light, and it flickered twice and caught, gold and warm against walls I'd chosen the paint for a decade ago, and something in my chest loosened instead of tightened.
"Windows," I said, because I needed something to do with my hands. "Let's open some windows. It needs air."
He didn't argue. We moved through the house together, room by room, and I threw the windows open to the spring evening while he found the old brass lamps and coaxed them back to life one at a time, and slowly the house stopped being a shuttered tomb and started being, unmistakably, ours again.
Mud season air poured in, damp and green and alive, carrying the smell of the mountains waking up, and I stood in the middle of our old living room and felt two years of held breath finally, finally release.
"It's exactly the same," I said, running a hand along the back of the couch, dust coming away on my fingers. "I thought it would feel different. Haunted, maybe. It just feels like ours."
"It is ours," Cormac said, close behind me now, not touching, giving me the room to feel whatever I needed to feel. "It never stopped being ours. It just waited."
I moved through the rest of the downstairs slowly, trailing my fingers over things I hadn't touched in two years — the cookbook shelf, still arranged in my old, faintly ridiculous system of frequency-of-use rather than alphabetical; the little chip in the doorframe from the time Cormac tried to move the couch himself instead of waiting for help and paid for his stubbornness in drywall dust and a bruised knuckle; the window seat where I used to read on Sunday mornings while he made too much coffee for one person, a habit he'd apparently never broken, judging by the two mismatched mugs still sitting in the drying rack, untouched, exactly where I'd left them the last morning before the funeral, because I hadn't been able to make myself put them away.
He found me looking at those mugs and went very still.
"I never washed them," I admitted. "I don't know why.
I told myself it was because I was too busy with the funeral arrangements, and then too busy grieving, and then it just became this thing I couldn't do, this last piece of evidence that you'd been alive in this kitchen the same as any other morning.
I used to come back here sometimes, in the first few months, just to look at them. "
"Josie."
"I'm not telling you that to make you feel guilty," I said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same thing he'd say to me weeks later on a different, harder night.
"I'm telling you because it's true, and because I think we should probably finally wash them, together, if that's all right. I think I'm ready."
We washed the mugs together at the kitchen sink, the water running warm over both our hands, and it was such a small, ordinary task and it undid something enormous in both of us, standing there side by side finishing a chore two years overdue.
I turned to look at him in the lamplight, and the last six weeks of careful, patient courtship — every small permission, every earned inch, every night on the porch not quite touching — all of it seemed to gather itself into this one room, this one moment, and I understood, with a certainty that settled bone-deep, that I was done waiting too.
I crossed the space between us and kissed him.
He made a low sound against my mouth, something between relief and disbelief, and his hands came up slow to cradle my face the way they had in the doorway that first impossible night, and this time there was nothing careful left in either of us.
Two years of grief and six weeks of restraint broke all at once, gentle and overwhelming in the same breath.
"Josie." My name, rough, half a question, giving me one last chance to change my mind.
"I'm sure," I said, and I was — surer than I'd been of almost anything in two years. "I want this. I want you. I've wanted you since the second you said my name on my doorstep, and I've been so scared of wanting it that I made you wait six weeks, and I don't want to wait anymore."
"You didn't make me wait," he said, his forehead resting against mine, both of us breathing unsteadily. "I'd have waited six years if that's what you needed. I want you to know that, before we do this. Nothing about tonight is you owing me anything. It's only ever been about what you're ready for."
"I know," I said, and felt something in my chest crack open at the plain honesty of it, at a man who'd spent two years fighting to come home to me making absolutely sure, even now, even here, that I understood I owed him nothing at all.
"That's exactly why I'm ready. Because you never once made me feel like I had to be. "
He kissed me again, slower this time, deliberate, like he was memorizing the shape of my mouth all over again, and I felt the low hum of two years of separation vibrating under every point of contact between us, every place his hands found — my jaw, my waist, the small of my back where his palm had always fit like it was built for exactly that spot.
We moved toward the bedroom without breaking apart, unsteady, laughing once when I stepped on his boot and nearly took us both down, the laugh dissolving back into the kiss almost before it finished.
The bedroom door creaked the exact same creak it always had.
The bed was made — I'd made it, months ago, in some private ritual I hadn't examined too closely at the time, some part of me apparently keeping this room ready even while telling myself I'd never come back to it.
Cormac undressed me slowly, and there was nothing rushed in it, nothing that felt like hunger finally being fed after a long fast — it felt like reverence, like a man handling something he'd genuinely believed he'd never be allowed to touch again, memorizing every inch as he uncovered it.
His hands shook, just slightly, when he found the clasp of my dress, and I covered them with mine.
"It's okay," I said. "I'm here. This is real."
"I know," he said, voice rough. "I just keep waiting to wake up in that room. Two years, Josie. Two years I lay in a bed that wasn't mine and imagined exactly this, and it never once felt real enough to trust. I don't know how to trust it yet. I'm working on it."
"Then let me help you trust it," I said, and guided his hand to my chest, over my heart, where it beat fast and unmistakably real under his palm.
He made a sound low in his throat and kissed me again, deeper this time, and whatever hesitation had been holding him back seemed to finally, fully release.
My dress fell away, and his shirt followed, and I found the new landscape of him in the lamplight — leaner than he'd been, harder in some places, and marked in ways he hadn't been before.
A scar along his ribs I didn't recognize.
Another at his shoulder, pale and old-looking already, healed wrong in a way that told me it hadn't been tended properly when it happened.
A third, smaller, at his hip, half-hidden below his waistband, that made my throat tighten looking at it.
I traced each one with my fingers and then, slower, with my mouth, the way I'd once kissed him goodbye at a casket I now knew had been empty the whole time.
The lamplight caught the new lines of him, the leanness that told its own story of two years of insufficient food and constant vigilance, and I let my hands map all of it, unhurried, memorizing this new version of a body I'd once known as well as my own.
"What happened here," I murmured against his ribs.
"Story for another night," he said, voice unsteady under my hands. "Tonight I don't want to talk about that house. Tonight I just want to be here. With you. Please, Josie."
So I let the questions go, for tonight, and gave him what he asked for instead — my full, undivided presence, every scar acknowledged and set gently aside, every inch of him welcomed home the way the house itself had been welcomed back to life around us.
He laid me back against the pillows I'd chosen years ago, and the spring air moved the curtains at the open window, cool against heated skin, and everything about it felt suspended between two worlds — the grief-soaked past and the impossible, reclaimed present, both of them present at once in every touch.
His mouth found the curve of my throat, unhurried, and I arched into him, into two years of missing this exact weight, this exact warmth, my hands finding his shoulders and holding on like he might disappear again if I let go.
"I thought I'd never feel this again," I whispered, my voice breaking on it, honest in a way I couldn't have managed with the lights on, couldn't have managed a month ago.
"I made my peace with a lifetime of missing you.
I built a whole life around the missing.
And now you're here, and I don't know how to hold both things at once — the peace I made and the want I never actually let go of. "