14. Josie
JOSIE
Okay.
I stand there a second with my hand still curled where his chest used to be, and I put it away neat, the way you’d fold a shirt.
It’s fine. That’s not a no—that’s not anything.
That’s a man four beers deep at his own party mishearing a metaphor with Tucker yelling in his other ear.
My fault for trying it in the blast radius.
I built a plan out of string lights and a cute line and forgot to build in the part where he’s Levi at a club party, which is a weather system, not a man you can schedule.
It stings anyway. I let myself feel it sting for exactly five seconds, standing there—the practiced line lying where it fell, Tucker howling Ford Valley MC somewhere behind me—because it was supposed to be the moment, the one we tell the kid about, and instead I got a punchline and the back of his shirt. Five seconds. Okay. Done.
The mirror version was always a fantasy; fine.
I’ll get him in a few minutes, out by the trucks, two sentences, no metaphor this time—Levi, I’m pregnant—plain as a parts order.
He’ll hear that one fine. And his face will do the thing, and this whole botched run at it will turn into the funny first half of the story.
That’s the thing about us three years in: our best stories all have a botched first half.
Up front they’ve got him doing shots. The room roars at something Reyes says.
Wyatt’s launched into the winter run story again—I can tell from here, from the shape of the crowd, the way Levi’s hand comes up to his own collarbone where the frostbite scar is, right on cue, like a man playing himself in a movie.
My eyes are stinging a little and that’s stupid, so I quit standing in the middle of the floor like a lost kid at the fair and go find something to do with my hands.
Drink table. Great. Cups need stacking; the wine needs somebody to top it off.
My hands like having jobs—always have, it’s a family trait, my mother could dust a whole house during an argument—and I stack and straighten and top off with my back half to the room, giving my face a minute off from the party, running the revised plan.
Out by the trucks. Ten minutes. Two sentences.
I’m actually smiling again by the time I’ve got the cups squared away, because the new version has its own charm if you tilt it right—no staging, no metaphor, just the two of us on a tailgate in the June dark and the biggest sentence of our lives. Maybe that was always the better?—
“There she is.” Marley, sliding in easy on the other side of the table, holding her cup out while I’ve got the bottle. Why not. “Cute party.”
“It came together.” I pour her a splash. “Lights worked out.”
“Told you. Beam line.” She smiles, swirls the cup.
“Got some great stuff tonight, by the way. The toast’s gonna be good, Wyatt’s very photogenic in a large-predator way.
And I got one of you two by the cake table earlier you’re going to want printed big.
You didn’t know I was shooting it, which is why it’s good. ”
“That’s the job, right? Catching people not performing.”
“That’s the job.” Something amused crosses her face, there and gone, some private joke with herself.
“You’d be surprised what a camera sees at a party.
Everybody thinks they’re being so smooth.
” She takes a sip, looking out at the room—and I follow her eyes without meaning to: the crowd up front, Levi’s head above most of it, thrown back laughing at something.
“Honestly, watching you two tonight made me smile. It’s kind of sweet. ”
“Thanks.” Warm, dumb, easy—I’m barely in the conversation, I’m doing math about how many minutes till I can peel him loose.
“Like—good for you guys, you know?” She takes a sip. Light as anything. Friendly as a sidewalk. “Guess whatever happened a few weeks back really didn’t mean anything, then. Glad it didn’t wreck things.”
The music doesn’t stop.
Nothing stops. That’s the insane part, the part my body can’t process standing here: the bass keeps thumping.
Somebody keeps laughing by the pool table.
Tucker’s yelling about horseshoes through the propped door.
The party goes right on being a party all around me while every drop of blood in my body goes somewhere else all at once.
My ears do this thing—this roar, this sudden held-underwater hush, like both of them sealed over at once.
And the floor moves. It doesn’t, obviously, it’s a concrete slab, but something under my feet tilts anyway, drops an inch that isn’t there, and my hand goes cold so fast around the plastic cup that I actually look down at it.
White knuckles. Wine shivering in little rings.
Whatever happened a few weeks back.
And my brain—this is the horrible part, the part I can feel happening, like watching your own hand go into a garbage disposal—my brain starts helping.
It’s fast and thorough and it wants to be useful, and it goes and gets things.
Three weeks ago. The rough patch. The nine days he barely looked at me, and then it broke like a fever—broke overnight, actually, didn’t it, one day he was a wall and the next he came home early with gas station flowers—and he’s been so sweet ever since, so easy, so good, weeks of good, dishes done and feet rubbed and cooked dinners, laughing at burned garlic bread, sweeter than he’s been in a year, what’s gotten into you lately anyway?—
—and the face he made at the sink when I showed him Dot’s text. The fish-flick. The half-second I caught the tail of and filed under nothing.
My brain lays it all out on the table in front of me like a good dog bringing back the worst stick in the world, and it takes maybe two seconds, all of it, two seconds standing at a drink table with a bottle of grocery-store red in my hand.
And my body—my body is doing things nobody at this party can see.
My knees have gone to something structural-grade wrong, water where the bone should be.
There’s a sound in the room now underneath the bass, or maybe over it, this thin high whine like a line about to part.
The bottle in my hand weighs four hundred pounds and also nothing.
And somewhere in the middle of my chest, in the exact spot where four days of joy have been living—the plan, the line, the wall of framed pictures—something is going down slow and enormous, like watching a barn come off its foundation in a flood, whole, silent, still shaped like a barn all the way into the water.
Say it’s nothing. Say she means something else, some shop thing, some club thing, some perfectly boring thing that everybody knows and nobody mentioned. There’s still a door here. There’s still a version where I laugh and say oh, that, and mean it.
I hear myself say it before I decide to. Flat. Normal. Somebody else’s voice coming out of my mouth, some capable woman who is not currently sliding down a wall inside her own body:
“What happened a few weeks back?”
And Marley’s face—it moves. Quick, careful, a shutter-click: the easy smile still hanging there while something behind it recalculates, checking a door she thought was open. Like she’s only now—only NOW—running the numbers on whether I already knew.
And in the half-second her face spends recalculating, mine must be doing something too, because whatever she finds in it settles the math for her.
I watch her choose. I actually watch it happen—the flicker where a decent person would grab the grenade back, say oh God, I thought you knew about the shop thing, the invoice thing, some harmless thing, anything—and she doesn’t reach for any of it.
She sets her cup down instead, unhurried, and gives me the gentlest, most careless shrug in the world.
“Ask him,” she says. “Not really mine to say.”