11. Raven
— ? —
Raven
Morning came with the smell of good coffee. Not just coffee, but the Ethiopian blend I loved and never bought because forty dollars a pound seemed insane even with HBO money coming in regularly.
I lay in bed, eyes closed, rethinking every life choice that had led to this moment.
To being in Josh’s childhood bedroom, in the bed we’d shared during family visits, while he slept on an air mattress that wheezed all night with respiratory issues.
The whole night had been an exercise in trying not to think about his proximity.
Close enough that I could hear every shift, every breath, every moment he’d been awake not sleeping either.
The pillows on my side were perfect. Both of them, exactly the support I needed, while he’d kept the flat ancient one that probably dated back to his actual childhood.
The smoke detector’s light was covered, no green blink to disturb my sleep.
The door hadn’t squeaked when I’d gotten up at 2 AM to pee, tiptoeing past his air mattress, a burglar in my own temporary space.
I noticed each small kindness and hated that I was noticing, hated that some scared part of me was keeping track. Two feelings rose against my will and refused to sit together: the one that wanted to believe him, and the one braced for the moment he’d turn back into who he’d been.
The believing part kept a list it couldn’t help making: the coffee he’d somehow procured, the pillows, the smoke detector, the door that no longer squeaked, the way he’d offered to sleep on the beach rather than make me uncomfortable.
The braced part had the very same list, because he was Josh Gardner, Oscar-nominated, capable of making anyone believe anything for the length of a scene.
Of everything on the list, the smoke detector bothered me most because I couldn’t decide which part of me to trust it to.
It was such a specific thing to remember.
Such a small detail from our marriage that no one else would know or care about.
Either he’d genuinely held onto that information for two years, or he was the most thorough method actor in history.
I hated the braced part of me. I’d built it myself, brick by defensive brick, because bracing was safe.
If everything he did was a performance, then I never had to risk being wrong about him a second time.
The trouble was that method actors don’t oil door hinges at eleven at night in a house where no one would ever catch them at it.
They perform for an audience. He’d done all of it while I was asleep.
I got up, thinking I should just leave. Drive back to Boston, catch a flight to LA, send Paige an expensive gift with an apologetic note. Anything to avoid three more days of this proximity that made my skin feel too tight and my brain too loud.
Josh was in the kitchen, hair messy from sleep, wearing running clothes that were actually wet with sweat, not the decorative athletic wear most people in LA sported.
He was making breakfast, unbothered, the two lost years simply erased, the two of us in his mother’s kitchen on what might have been any ordinary morning.
“Everyone’s gone for the day,” he said without looking up from the eggs he was scrambling. “Wedding prep and the beach. Mom left a note with seventeen exclamation points about staying out of Paige’s way.”
“Sounds right.”
“I went for a run. Grabbed coffee from that place in town you liked.”
The place in town was a long way on foot. He’d run there and back for coffee. I could see the sweat still drying on his shirt, the way his hair stuck to his forehead. I said none of this.
What I said was: “You ran an hour for coffee. Training for a marathon or a Nicholas Sparks adaptation?”
“Whichever one you’re casting.”
Damn him. Damn him and his easy charm that still worked even when I knew better.
The charm had always been the problem, and not because it was fake.
Because it wasn’t. He could no more switch it off than change his eye color, and for years I’d been the only person in the world it was aimed at.
I hadn’t understood, until it stopped, what it had been quietly holding up in me the entire time.
“You remembered?” The words came out quieter than I’d intended, skeptical but with an undertone I didn’t want to name.
“I remember everything about you.”
The words hung between us, a challenge I wasn’t ready to accept. I took the coffee, burned my tongue drinking it too fast to avoid responding. It was perfect. The exact ratio of coffee to cream, the precise temperature I liked, even the specific mug I’d always chosen from his mother’s collection.
“Paige needs help with favors,” he said, sliding a piece of paper across the counter. “Want to drive together?”
“I have my own car.”
“Right. Of course.”
He tore the list in half with the precision of someone dividing assets, gave me the easier stores, the ones that didn’t require heavy lifting or complicated negotiations.
“Thanks for helping,” he said. “You don’t have to.”
“It’s for Paige.”
“Still. Thank you.”
I didn’t know what to say to genuine gratitude from him, so I took my half of the list and my perfect coffee and left.
We ended up at the same craft store anyway, because Nantucket only had so many places that sold ribbon in bulk. I reached for a roll of silver ribbon at the exact moment he did. Our hands touched. We both jerked back, startled and guilty.
“Sorry-”
“It’s fine-”
“Take it-”
“No, you-”
We stood there, both idiots, refusing to take the ribbon, until an elderly woman reached between us and took it herself.
“Young people,” she muttered, shaking her head.
We worked in careful parallel after that.
Josh lifting heavy boxes without being asked, muscles visible under his t-shirt in a way that I absolutely wasn’t noticing.
I organized with the hyperfocus that had once made him call me his “beautiful chaos,” back when chaos was a quality he loved instead of material he mocked on television.
At some point, Josh commandeered the glue gun for the favor boxes. He applied himself to the task with the intensity of someone performing surgery, tongue slightly out in concentration, the same face he’d made when learning lines for difficult scenes.
A while in, I noticed he’d stopped using his left hand. It stayed suspiciously below the table edge, out of sight.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Josh.”
“It’s fine. I’m adapting.”
He continued working one-handed a while longer, applying glue and positioning ribbons with the determination usually reserved for Olympic athletes. His left hand never reappeared.
At the register, while I was paying for my materials, I caught him trying to peel something off his fingers with his teeth.
“How long?” I asked flatly.
“How long what?”
“How long have your fingers been glued together?”
He paused, probably calculating whether he could lie convincingly with his hand behind his back. “Forty minutes.”
“You’ve been working with glued fingers for forty minutes?”
“Forty productive minutes.”
Without thinking, I took his hand. His pulse jumped under my thumb as I examined the damage. His index and middle fingers were thoroughly webbed with dried glue, the hand of a man auditioning for a duck-themed superhero movie.
“This is ridiculous,” I said, but I was already carefully picking at the glue, peeling it away in small pieces. “Stupid.”
“Stupidly artistic.”
We were standing in the craft store parking lot, me holding his hand, and the two years I’d spent training myself not to think about these hands might as well not have happened.
His pulse was going insane under my thumb.
Neither of us said a word about the intimacy of it, about how natural it felt, about how my body still recognized his even when the rest of me insisted we were strangers.
I dropped his hand, burned, and drove away without another word. Spent the whole drive back yelling at myself for the hand-holding, for the way my skin still felt warm where we’d touched, for the fact that I’d wanted to keep holding on.
Back at the compound, helping with lunch prep, I decided to run a test. A stupid test that I refused to admit was a test even to myself.
I let myself spiral into a full ADHD tangent, the kind that used to make Josh’s eyes glaze over in the last years of our marriage.
“These favor boxes remind me of the shipping industry in the 1800s,” I said to no one in particular, though Josh was close enough to hear.
“Like, they had to figure out how to transport things without cardboard, so everything was in wooden crates, and they’d use wax seals for security, which is weird because wax is so easy to fake, but I guess it was more about the ceremony of it, and speaking of ceremonies, I saw this documentary about Victorian mourning stationery where they had different paper for different stages of grief, with black borders that got thinner as time passed, and the width of the border indicated your relationship to the deceased, which is actually a brilliant system if you think about it-”
I watched Josh from the corner of my eye, waiting for the wince. The eye roll. The subtle shift that meant he was tuning me out.
Instead, he looked up from the vegetables he was chopping.
“Was it that BBC documentary? The one with the historian who kept getting excited about paper quality?”
I stopped mid-word. “You watched it?”
“Last month. They didn’t mention that the Victorian postal service had nine deliveries a day in London. Nine. Can you imagine? Now we’re lucky if we get one.”
“How did they manage nine?”
“Population density and the fact that every postal worker had to memorize every street. No maps. Just memory. Like human GPS systems.”
I lost the thread of my own trap. He’d followed the tangent, added to it, turned it into an actual conversation instead of the monologue I’d been performing.
A knot in me eased, grimly, against my better judgment. Another mark in the “he’s changed” category.
It didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t mean anything.