38. Salem
SALEM
Iused to love coming home.
I could be anywhere—a bad day at work, a long drive, a week that had ground me down to something small and tired—and the moment I turned the key and stepped inside, I felt it.
Home. Rowan’s grandmother-core coastal décor, her homemade kombucha brewing phase, and the throw pillows we kept buying in moments of emotional instability. All of it. Mine. Ours. Safe.
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. “Rowan?”
Nothing.
I moved farther in, my steps slowing.
The living room was empty.
Not just tidied. The blanket was gone—the one that lived permanently on the back of the couch because Rowan fell asleep reading approximately four nights out of seven, and I always went and covered her up before I went to bed.
The stack of books she rotated through. The small shelf I had tried to build her for one of her birthdays—we had put one book on it, it collapsed into a pile of boards, and we had laughed about it for a week.
Gone. The pile of shoes by the door that I tripped over every single morning, the one I complained about constantly and would give a significant amount of money to trip over right now—
Gone.
“Rowan?”
Silence.
I walked down the hallway and stopped outside her door.
Closed. She never closed her door. Not even to change, I have seen her boobs on thousands of occasions.
I stood there and listened. Nothing moved on the other side. I raised my hand to knock and then didn’t, because I didn’t have it in me to be told to go away aloud when the closed door was already doing it for her.
I went back to the living room and sat on the couch.
Her things were gone from the shared spaces. All of it relocated presumably behind that closed door, which meant either she had moved everything into her room in a fit of fury—which was possible, this was Rowan—or she was sending me a message about access.
The front door opened.
I turned.
Rowan stepped inside, keys in hand, her expression flat. She saw me, stopped for a second, and kept walking.
“Rowan—”
She didn’t look at me. Down the hallway, her door opened and closed with a quiet click.
I sat there.
She‘d never done that. In all the years we had lived together, through every rough patch, she had never just walked past me like I wasn’t there. She had never ignored me.
I had done something unforgivable.
That sat in my chest.
I picked up my phone, opened the thread with Ethan, and scrolled up through it. Hearts and laughing faces and more hearts, all the way back to the beginning. Those little symbols had no idea what had happened since.
I dropped the phone onto the cushion beside me and pressed both hands over my face.
I could call Alba.
I didn’t want to call Alba. Alba was sunshine and certainty, and I was sitting in a half-empty apartment, having managed to hurt basically every person I cared about in the span of twenty-four hours.
But I didn’t want to watch the look on her face—or the tone of her voice—when she realized the full extent of it. Alba thought I was better than this.
I was not, currently, better than this.
The apartment was too quiet. This space used to hold two people’s worth of noise, and now, it held half that.
What if she stayed like this? What if it didn’t fix itself in a few days? What if she decided it was just easier to fold the shared parts of our life back to her side of the line and leave me over here with mine?
I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I didn’t want to sit here and do it alone.