2. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The shoebox is buried in the back of the closet, underneath a stack of sweaters I keep meaning to donate and a pair of boots I bought three years ago and have never worn.
I don’t know why I’m cleaning today. I woke up restless, my sleep thin and fractured, Glenn’s texts playing on loop in my head every time I closed my eyes. They’re talking about hospice. The words won’t leave me alone.
I texted him this morning. He said John was stable, which means not worse but not better, which means they’re all just waiting. I hate that word, stable. It sounds like hope but it isn’t.
So I’m cleaning. Reorganizing. Doing something with my hands because if I sit still I’ll start crying and I might not stop. The closet seemed like a good place to start. It’s full of things I don’t need, clothes I don’t wear, memories I’ve been avoiding.
The shoebox is dented at one corner. I remember dropping it during our last move, the way Corey nudged it with his foot and said we should throw it out. “It’s junk. Old receipts or whatever.”
I didn’t throw it out. I couldn’t explain why then and I can’t explain why now.
I sit cross-legged on the closet floor, surrounded by castoffs and forgotten things, and pull off the lid.
The first thing I see is my diner apron. Pale blue polyester, permanently stained with coffee no matter how many times I washed it. The name tag is still pinned to the front, slightly crooked the way it always was because I could never get it to sit straight. WILLOW, in faded black letters.
I trace my name with my fingertip. I remember the weight of this apron around my waist, the ache in my feet after a double shift, the way the smell of bacon grease clung to my hair, the regulars who knew my name and tipped in crumpled singles and told me I was too pretty to be slinging hash.
I was so happy then. That’s the ridiculous thing. I was exhausted and broke and my feet hurt constantly, but I was happy in a way I can’t quite remember how to be anymore.
Underneath the apron is the ledger.
I pull it out carefully. The binding is cracked, the pages yellowed, threatening to fall apart in my hands.
This is from before we could afford real accounting software, before we could afford anything.
Corey was running his startup out of our living room with two guys from his computer science classes, and I was keeping the books by hand because it was free and I had neat handwriting.
I flip through the pages, my own words staring back at me from years ago.
Rent: $800. That was the apartment over the laundromat, the one where the machines ran at all hours and the whole place smelled like dryer sheets and occasionally like the weed the neighbors smoked.
Electric: $47. Internet: $62. I remember agonizing over that bill, wondering if we could find something cheaper, knowing we couldn’t because Corey needed fast upload speeds for his code.
Revenue: $0. $0. $0. Page after page of nothing. We lived on my tips and the cheapest food we could find and the sheer stubborn belief that someday it would get better.
And then, on the fourteenth page: $150.
I remember that day so clearly it hurts. Corey burst through the door of our apartment, laptop in hand, practically vibrating with excitement. “We made a sale!” he kept shouting, spinning me around the tiny kitchen until we knocked over a chair. “Willow, we made a fucking sale!”
That night we sat on the floor and ate instant noodles because we still couldn’t afford a table.
The carpet was older than both of us, some hideous brown pattern from the seventies, and the heat had gone out again so we were both wrapped in blankets.
But we were laughing. We were talking about the future like it was bright and possible, and I was so in love with him I could barely breathe.
At the bottom of the box, underneath old receipts and a movie ticket stub from our first date, I find the photograph.
Our apartment. The one with the heater that clanked and groaned and gave up entirely every November.
In the photo, I’m standing by the window, afternoon light catching my hair, laughing at something outside the frame.
I remember what I was laughing at. Corey was making stupid faces at me, trying to get a candid shot, saying I didn’t have a bad angle.
The movie on the ticket stub was terrible.
Some action thing with too many explosions and a plot that made no sense.
We spent most of it making out in the back row, and afterward we got cheap pizza and walked around the city for hours, talking about everything and nothing.
I kept that stub because it was proof. Proof that we used to be those people, the kind who made out in movie theaters and ate pizza on park benches and didn’t need anything but each other.
The girl in the photograph looks so young. So certain. So completely unaware of everything that’s coming.
I’m still staring at it when I hear footsteps behind me.
“What are you doing?”
I jump hard enough to bang my elbow against the wall. Corey is standing in the closet doorway, still in his work clothes, laptop bag slung over his shoulder. The light from the bedroom is behind him, turning him into a silhouette.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I say, pressing a hand to my racing heart. “You’re home early.”
“Meeting got canceled.” He comes closer, peering over my shoulder at the open box. His face shifts when he sees what I’m holding. “Is that the old apartment?”
“Yeah.”
He sets his laptop bag down by the door and lowers himself to the floor beside me, his back against the closet wall.
He’s close enough that I can smell his cologne, that expensive stuff he started wearing when the company took off.
Underneath it, if I focus, I can still catch traces of him.
The real him, not the billionaire version.
“Holy shit,” he says, reaching past me to pull out the apron. “Is this from the diner?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t throw it out.”
“I thought you hated that job.”
“I didn’t hate it. My feet hated it. I was fine with the rest of it.”
He’s turning the apron over in his hands, touching the stains, the crooked name tag. He looks almost reverent.
“Is this the ledger?” He reaches for it, and I hand it over. He flips through the pages, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. “God. Look at these numbers. We were so fucking broke.”
“We really were.”
“You wrote everything by hand.”
“You couldn’t afford accounting software. You couldn’t afford a calculator.”
“I could afford ramen.” The smile grows slightly. “Plenty of ramen.”
“You could afford the cheap ramen. The stuff that came in bricks and tasted like sadness.”
“It built character.” He’s grinning now, actually grinning, and it transforms his whole face. He looks younger. Lighter. Like the boy who used to eat ramen on the floor with me and talk about taking over the world. “I can’t believe you kept all this.”
“I kept everything.”
He sets the ledger down and picks up the photograph. His smile fades.
I watch him stare at it, his thumb tracing the edge of the frame. His jaw is tight. That muscle is twitching under his skin again, the one that means he’s fighting something he doesn’t want to say.
“I hated that apartment,” he says finally.
The words hit me in the chest.
“What?”
“I hated it.” His voice is flat, distant. “The heater never worked. You were cold all the time, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and you’d be shivering, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t fix it, couldn’t afford to fix it, couldn’t afford to move us somewhere better.”
“Corey…”
“And you were working those double shifts at the diner, on your feet for twelve hours because I couldn’t make enough money to support us. You’d come home exhausted, and I’d watch you try to hide it, and the whole time I knew it was my fault. Every single day in that place, I was failing you.”
I stare at him. He’s still looking at the photograph, not at me.
“Corey.” I take the photograph out of his hands and set it aside. “Look at me.”
He looks. His eyes are wet.
“Those were the happiest years of my life,” I say.
He shakes his head, already dismissing me, already filing my words under things Willow says to be nice. “You don’t have to…”
“I’m not being nice. I’m being honest.” I grab his hands, both of them, wrapping my fingers around his cold ones.
“I know it was hard. I know we were broke and scared and freezing half the time. But I had you. We had each other. We used to sit on that ugly carpet and eat noodles and talk for hours, about everything, about nothing, and I was so happy I didn’t know what to do with it. ”
“You were cold all the time.”
“I didn’t care.”
“The heater…”
“Fuck the heater, Corey.” I squeeze his hands tighter, forcing him to hear me.
“I would go back to that apartment tomorrow. I would live there for the rest of my life, no heat, no money, nothing but ramen and that ugly carpet, if it meant having you the way I had you then. Present. Here. Mine. Not distracted, not exhausted, not falling asleep in dining room chairs because you’ve been up since four.
Just you. Just us. That’s all I ever wanted. That’s all I still want.”
He’s shaking his head again, but slower now. More uncertain.
“I don’t understand,” he says. “How could you have been happy? I couldn’t give you anything. I couldn’t take care of you. I was useless.”
“You weren’t useless. You were mine.” I let go of one of his hands so I can touch his face, turn it toward me.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because I thought you’d make me rich.
I fell in love with you because you were the only person who ever really saw me.
You noticed things. You remembered things.
You showed up for me in ways no one else ever had. ”
“I’m not showing up now.”
“No. You’re not.” I don’t flinch away from it. Neither does he. “But you used to. And I keep hoping… I keep waiting for that person to come back.”
His phone rings.
We both freeze. The sound is shrill in the quiet closet, cutting through everything.
Corey pulls away from me, reaching for his pocket. He looks at the screen. I watch his face close off, watch the mask slide back into place.
“It’s the office,” he says. “There’s an issue with one of the overseas teams. I have to…”
“Take it.”
“Willow…”
“Take it.” I pull my hands back into my lap. “It’s fine.”
He holds my gaze, and I can see him fighting it, see him wanting to let the call go to voicemail, wanting to stay here with me in this closet surrounded by pieces of our past. But the phone keeps ringing, and he keeps looking at it, and we both know how this ends.
He answers. “Yeah, I’m here. What’s going on?”
He pushes himself to his feet, already walking out of the closet, his voice shifting into that clipped professional tone that means he’s going to be on this call for hours. “No, that’s not going to work. We need to…”
His voice fades down the hallway. I hear his office door close.
I sit there on the floor, alone, surrounded by the scattered contents of our old life. The apron. The ledger. The photograph of a girl who thought love was enough.
I start repacking the box. The apron goes in first, then the ledger, then the ticket stub from our first date that I can’t throw away even though the movie was terrible and we spent most of it with our mouths pressed together in the dark.
The photograph goes on top, face-down, because I can’t look at it anymore without wanting to cry.
The house is quiet. Corey is in his office, handling whatever crisis required his attention more than I did. I wonder if he’ll come out before midnight. I wonder if he’ll remember we were in the middle of something.
I know the answer already.
The afternoon fades into evening. I heat up leftovers for dinner, eat them standing at the kitchen counter, leave a plate outside his office door even though I know he won’t touch it.
I take a shower. I read a book I’ve been trying to finish for three months.
I check my phone for updates from Glenn and find nothing, which is worse than bad news because at least bad news is something.
I go to bed alone, the way I do most nights. The sheets are cold on his side. I lie there in the dark listening to the distant murmur of his voice through the walls, wondering what it would take to make him choose me over a phone call. Wondering if anything would be enough.
He finally crawls into bed at 11:47 p.m. I know the exact time because I’m staring at the clock, pretending to be asleep. The mattress dips under his weight. He moves carefully, trying not to wake me, sliding under the covers with the caution of a man who knows he’s already in trouble.
“You still up?” he whispers.
“Sort of.”
“I’m sorry. The call took forever.”
“It’s okay.”
It’s not okay. We both know it’s not okay. But I’m too tired to fight about it, and he’s too tired to hear me, so we lie there in the dark pretending everything is fine.
Sleep starts pulling at me, heavy and warm. I’m drifting, almost gone, when my phone lights up on the nightstand.
The brightness cuts through the dark. I reach for it without thinking, expecting spam, expecting nothing.
It’s Glenn.
He’s calling.
Glenn never calls. Glenn texts, always texts, even when he has something important to say. Calling means something is wrong. This late, it means everything is wrong.
I answer. “Glenn?”
The sound that comes through the phone isn’t words. It’s a sob, raw and broken, from somewhere deep inside him.
“Willow.” His voice cracks on my name. “Willow, he’s gone.”