39. Ethan
ETHAN
Maya Layburn was the best real estate agent in the Pacific Northwest. She also happened to be a childhood friend of Miles and me.
She arrived on time with a notebook in hand, efficient, professional, and unbothered that I had called her groggily and rushed her to show up after dodging her calls for some time.
She moved through the house—assessing, noting, separating the property from the person living in it. She was great at her job.
The living room first. She walked it slowly with her hands behind her back, looking around with the focused attention of someone reading a language I didn’t speak.
“Good bones,” she said. “Nice light. The floors had held up well. The windows are original but functional.”
The kitchen. She opened a cabinet and closed it. Ran a hand along the counter. “Light refresh. We can update the hardware, maybe the backsplash. Nothing major.”
The bedrooms. The bathroom. The hallway with my grandfather’s photographs still hanging in the order he had put them. She noted the condition of the walls, the baseboards, and the closet space. Her pen moved across her notebook in steady, efficient marks.
By the time we made it back to the kitchen, she had a list.
A short one.
“Honestly.” She set the notebook on the counter and looked at me directly. “It’s in better shape than most places I see at this stage. You’ve put real work into it. A few updates, a coat of paint in the second bedroom, and it shows well.” She tapped the list once. “This is an easy sell.”
I looked around the kitchen.
At the counters, which I’d refinished. I replaced the window frame above the sink last spring, because the original had started to rot. The small things had needed doing, and I had done them one by one.
The house was ready.
“Let’s check the yard,” she said.
I stepped outside first.
The garden sat along the back fence as it always had.
The hydrangeas in their purple skeleton form, holding on past their season, the way they always did.
The beds were clean, the soil was turned, and the small handwritten markers stood at their intervals the way they always had, faded at the edges from weather and time.
Nan’s handwriting was on most of them, and mine was on a few.
Maya stopped just past the threshold and scanned the space. “This is a lot.”
“It’s a garden.”
“It’s more than a garden.” She walked the perimeter slowly. “It would be a lot of work for a new owner. If we clear it out, even partially, you increase your appeal. Pave it over. Clean slate.”
Every bed in this garden had a place. Every plant had been put there for a reason, by hands that weren’t mine, tended by mine after hers were gone. The roses had darkened toward black at the center. The empty beds along the far fence where something new could go in spring, if someone put it there.
If I put it there.
“I’m not ripping it out,” I said.
“I’m not saying you have to, but it will help the sale. It’s an old house. Everything you can do will help.”
I didn’t answer.
She studied me. “Before I start anything, I need to know you actually want to do this. Because if you don’t—”
The argument I had been having with myself for weeks ran its familiar loop. Gray Harbor was temporary. The hardware store was never mine. I had only stayed because leaving felt complicated. The problem was this place—the size of it, the smallness of it.
But standing here, I could see it clearly for the first time.
The problem wasn’t Gray Harbor; it was me.
The uncertainty, the half-commitment, the pattern of getting close to things without stepping into them—that wasn’t a Gray Harbor problem.
That was an Ethan problem. It was an attempt to avoid profound grief.
I missed my Nan and Grandad immensely. It had been an Ethan problem in law school, and it would be an Ethan problem in Seattle or Portland or anywhere else I pointed the truck.
You couldn’t drive away from the thing you carried inside you.
I had watched my grandad try that once, after Nan died, and he had turned the car around before he hit the county line because he already knew but needed to learn.
You don’t leave the place that holds you. You figure out how to be held.
I looked at the empty beds along the far fence. “No.” Tears climbed behind my eyes, but I shook them off.
“No?”
“I’m not selling.”
She was quiet for a second, then she nodded once—not surprised, confirming something she had probably already seen coming, which made two of us. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
“You didn’t. Sometimes people need to get this far to know they don’t want to go further.” She picked up her folder and tucked it under her arm. “Call me if you change your mind.”
She squeezed my shoulder and let herself out.
It was cold in the backyard. The light was going early, the sky shifting toward that pale gray that settled over the harbor in the late afternoon, making everything look like it was being kept.
The season had changed when I wasn’t looking.
It felt like years since Salem, and I had sat on the beach in the pre-evening sun.
I sat on the back steps and called Miles, who picked up on the second ring.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m not selling the house.”
“Okay.”
In the background, I heard Paul say something. Then louder, he said, “I knew it. Miles, I knew it. Pay up—”
“Paul,” Miles said, his voice muffled.
“He’s not selling. I told you—”
“Paul.”
“I want it on record that I said this.”
“It’s on record,” Miles said, calm as anything as he turned his attention back to me. “You good?”
“Getting there,” I said.
“The store?”
“Mine. I think it’s been mine for a while.”
“Yeah.” It sounded like he’d known that too, like everyone had known that except me.
“Is Salem—”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Alba might try to see where her head is at. Give it a little time.”
I exhaled slowly. “Right.”
“You did the right thing. Both things.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Paul’s voice drifted back in from somewhere. “Thank you, Ethan! Miles owes me big.”
“Good night, Paul! Thanks, Miles.”
“I may make myself a trophy or this one—”
Miles hung up.
The cold settled around me, the garden going quiet and still in the fading light. I didn’t have her. Salem was somewhere in this town right now, and she wasn’t here. I didn’t know when or if any of that was going to resolve itself.
But I was here.
The hardware store was mine. The house was my home, not because I had inherited it or because leaving felt hard, but because I had shown up for it every day for two years and learned it. It was mine because I had made it mine.
I went inside.
The ranunculus bulbs were on the counter where I had left them, dry and patient and waiting for the right time. I filled a bowl with water and set them in to soak—the first step, the beginning of the process, the part that happened long before anything went into the ground.
I set the bowl on the windowsill where the morning light would find it and went to grab a beer and settle into my home for the night.