Chapter 36
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— Holden —
O ne year. I’d thought about how today would feel a million times. Wondered if it would hit different — heavier, sharper, worse. I woke up early and lay there for a while, waiting for it. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The quiet was the same quiet. I made coffee and it tasted like coffee.
Pete had moved the session to eight in the morning. I didn’t ask why. I knew why.
“How are you doing?” he said when I sat down.
“I’m here. I’m sober. I slept.” I looked at the window. November outside, gray and still. “Woke up early and lay there waiting for it to hit. It hasn’t yet. Maybe it will later.”
“What’s the plan for the day?”
“Flowers. Lindsay. Then home.”
He nodded. “I’m available today. All day. Phone’s on. If it gets hard at two in the afternoon or eleven at night, you call.”
“I know.”
“And Dutch and Colt — they know what today is.”
“Dutch texted this morning. Colt called last night.”
“Good. Use them.” Pete leaned forward. “You don’t have to get through today on your own, Holden. That’s not what any of this has been about.”
“I know,” I said again. And I did. A year ago I wouldn’t have.
“Thursday we’ll do the full session. Today I just wanted to see your face.” He stood. “Go see Danny’s mom.”
I drove to the flower shop.
Yellow roses. The same vase on the same sill. The same kitchen, the same coffee, the same chair. Eleven visits now. I’d stopped noticing the ritual of it — the parking, the door, the wave in — the way you stop noticing a drive you do every day. It had just become something I did.
We were halfway through our coffee when she said it.
“A year.” She turned her mug in her hands. “I wasn’t sure you’d keep coming, those first few months. I thought you might stop once it got easier.”
“It hasn’t got easier.”
“No. But it got different.” She looked at the photo of Danny on the sill. “The first time you sat at this table you couldn’t look at that picture. You remember?”
I remembered. I’d kept my eyes on the table, on my hands, on anywhere that wasn’t his face.
“Now you look at it every time you come in,” she said. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.”
She was right. I’d looked at it, at him, when I walked in today without thinking.
“These visits,” she said. “They’ve kept him alive for me.
Hearing you talk about him — not just the run, not just the end.
The other things. The tire he took twenty minutes on.
The questions he asked. The way he’d show up early and pretend he hadn’t.
” She smiled. “Nobody else tells me those stories. His friends from school stopped coming by months ago. But you keep showing up with your yellow roses and your stories about my son, and I get to hear his name said out loud in the room where he grew up.”
My throat tightened. “It’s helped me too,” I said. “More than I know how to say.”
“I know it has.” She put her hand over mine. “I can see it. That first visit you were barely holding on. Now you sit here and laugh about him.”
We sat for a while longer. She told me about a shoebox she’d found in his closet the week before — old route maps he’d drawn by hand, practicing, long before he’d ever been allowed near a real run. She’d kept them. I asked if I could see them next time.
“Next time,” she said. “And the time after that.”
As I drove home, I kept thinking about those route maps — Danny at his kitchen table, drawing lines on paper, planning runs he never got to go on. It still hurt. Just not as bad.
Back at the clubhouse I went to my room and sat on the bed. The compound was quiet for a Tuesday evening — brothers giving the day its weight without making a thing of it. I could hear someone in the kitchen down the hall. A TV on low in the common room. Normal sounds.
I picked up the journal from the nightstand. Opened it. Didn’t write anything. Just sat with it in my lap and looked at the room — the same room I’d been in a year ago when Bea had held me together.
The same walls. Different mattress — I’d got rid of the old one months ago. No big mattress-burning symbolism like Dutch. Just hauled it out and replaced it. Some things you don’t keep.
I heard a knock at my door. Figured it was probably Colt, maybe Dutch checking in again.
I opened it.
Bea was standing in the hallway.
I went very still.
She looked like she’d been crying — red-rimmed eyes, hands clasped in front of her, knuckles white. She wasn’t holding herself like armor anymore. She’d walked through the compound to get here. Past the brothers, past the bar, down the corridor to my door.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
“Can I come in?” Her voice was rough.
My mouth was dry. I wanted to pull her in, wanted to ask if she was okay, if she’d eaten, if she’d slept. I didn’t. “Of course,” I said carefully, stepping aside.
She came in slowly, her eyes moving around the room. She’d been here before — many times, over the months we were together. But the last time was a year ago. She’d sat on this bed and held me while I broke. She’d left a note on the nightstand. I wondered if she was thinking about that.
“Do you want something to drink? I can grab coffee from the kitchen.”
“No. I’m okay.” She sat on the edge of the bed. Jacket still on. Hands folded too carefully. Ready to leave.
I sat in the chair across from her and left the space between us.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said finally. “I was driving and I ended up here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not — I don’t have a speech.” She looked at her hands. “I just needed to see you. Today.”
She knew what today was. Of course she knew. “I’m glad you came,” I said. I kept my voice steady. I didn’t reach for anything more than that.
She was quiet for a while. Then — “I keep thinking about what I am to you now. Whether I’m your ex, or your therapist’s case study, or just—” She stopped. “The person who loved you.” She said it quietly, almost to herself. Like she was testing the words.
Loved.
Past tense. She’d used the past tense. Fuck. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs and didn’t breathe for a second.
She looked up and saw it land. She didn’t take it back. We sat with that.
“I should go,” she said after a while. She stood and pulled her jacket tighter around herself.
I stood too. Didn’t step closer.
“Bea.”
She stopped at the door and turned back.
“Thank you for coming.”
She held my eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded once and walked out.
I listened to her footsteps down the corridor until I couldn’t hear them anymore. Then I sat back down on the bed and looked at the room.
She’d come. On today of all days, she’d walked through the clubhouse and knocked on my door.