Chapter 1 #3
Slowly, I made myself smaller around the edges, telling myself it was a compromise. That muting yourself, your colors, your voice, your happiness was what loving someone looked like when you were the louder one.
I wore the dresses he liked. Stopped putting sprinkles on the eggs I made him on Sunday mornings because he said it was childish, and I heard it as you are.
I caught myself mid-sentence more times than I can count, watching his face for the exact moment his attention started to drift, and cutting myself short before he could do it for me.
I got very good at knowing when I was too much.
I got so good at it that I started doing it preemptively, pruning myself back before anyone had the chance to ask me to.
I don’t know when I stopped noticing. Or when it stopped feeling like a choice.
That’s the part that scares me most. Not that he didn’t love me the way I needed, but that I made myself so small for so long that I can’t quite remember, right now, what size I’m supposed to be.
“But…” Spencer says after a long pause, “She is fun and kind, the motherly type. I can see her as the mother of my kids.”
I let out a dry, bitter scoff, and my quiet companion glances at me.
He doesn’t say anything, of course, but his gaze is almost concerned, which makes my nose burn.
Great. Now I’m about to cry over basic human decency.
“She’s not that either anymore, is she?” Sienna argues. “Fun, I mean. Every time I talked to her these last few months, she was never anything but tired and sad. It got so bad that I stopped mentioning anything good. She would have tainted it.”
“Wait,” Aubrey says with a laugh. “You still haven’t told her about the pregnancy?”
“She will find out eventually, won’t she?”
My fingers curl around the edge of the counter until the laminate bites into my skin.
“Her mother just died,” Spencer cuts into their laughter. “I understand why she’s not… herself right now.”
“Well, let’s hope she will be soon,” Sienna says. “Or you will be miserable in your own home. Do you even still want her to move in?”
“I can’t backtrack now. She needs me.”
Can’t backtrack. Not, “I want to be with her,” or “I love her,” or “This is the right thing to do.” I’m an obligation he created for himself, and he’s not quite cruel enough to not see it through.
I was supposed to move into his place the day after the funeral. A very small apartment, but he told me we’d find something bigger eventually. He didn’t want to move in with me, since the house was old and two people had died in it.
His words, not mine. About the house I grew up in. Where my mother just died.
The same house where my dad collapsed over French toast twelve years ago, a heart attack at fifty-three.
She told that story often, for years after, laughing until she cried about the French toast that killed him, and I could never decide if it was funny or the saddest thing I’d ever heard.
I think it was both. I think most things that hurt that much are both.
I haven’t made French toast since. I keep meaning to, but I can’t quite bring myself to.
“That’s not what I asked. Do you want to live with her?” Sienna presses.
“Fuck, I don’t know, okay? I—”
The message ends, the abrupt click of it dying mid-sentence, like even the universe couldn’t stand to hear him finish.
I pull my phone from my ear and stare at my blurred reflection on the dark screen.
Spencer came to find me when he realized he’d left the message. Not to apologize or even fight for me. He thought I would hand over my phone without questioning and delete the evidence before I heard it.
But I’d already listened to it.
Again. And again. And again.
He doesn’t know that after I refused to let him in the house, I spent my last night in my childhood home, falling asleep with their cruel words ringing in my ears. He doesn’t know that by the next morning, while he was probably convincing himself I’d cool off, I was already gone.
Before anyone could tell me I was being dramatic.
Before anyone could try to fix something that was never real to begin with.
I’m mid-swipe of my sleeve under my eyes and shoving the phone into my purse as if it had burned me, when the napkin holder scrapes across the counter.
I look up to find Scruffy Guy nudging it toward me with one thick finger, his eyes still fixed on his water glass as if he didn’t witness my emotional collapse via three-minute voicemail.
A wet laugh escapes me as I pull a napkin out and press it to my face. “Thanks.”
He grunts. An actual acknowledgment, this time. Progress.
I blow my nose absolutely not delicately and crumple the napkin in my fist before glancing at him. “You heard all that, huh?”
He doesn’t answer, but his jaw tightens enough that I know he did.
“Cool. Great. Love that for me.” I nod to myself. “So you probably figured out I’m not here for the fall foliage.”
He says nothing.
“My best friend, Tessa, visited me that night.” My voice wobbles slightly, but I barrel on and get the rest out, “Because I sold my house, I’m jobless, because of what you just heard, and because…”
… and because I sat in that house after everyone left, in my mother’s kitchen that still smelled like her, and I understood for the first time that there was nothing left to stay for, and the only thread still pulling me anywhere was three words from a woman whom I haven’t seen in over a decade.
I don’t have anybody else anymore.
The ache that’s been sitting in my chest since I left Boston digs in deeper, but I swallow and keep going, “Now you might be wondering why I’m not crashing at Tessa’s place.
Excellent question. Complicated answer.” I lean in a little, lowering my voice as if we’re sharing a secret instead of me oversharing to a stranger.
“It’s because she told me to come to her in a dream.”