15. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I go to our old house for the last box.
I’ve been putting it off for weeks, finding excuses to delay, telling myself I’ll do it when I have more time, more energy, more emotional armor.
But the divorce is stalled and my company is launching in a week and I need the external hard drive buried somewhere in Cameron’s home office, the one with every development file I never trusted to the cloud.
I choose mid-afternoon deliberately. Cameron should be at my office, camped in his corner with his laptop and his flowers and his relentless presence.
So much for the space he promised me in the blackout.
His definition of space, it turns out, is six feet instead of three.
The house should be empty. I can get in, get what I need, and get out without having to see him.
I rehearse indifference the whole drive over. Get in, get the drive, get out. Don’t look at the kitchen. Don’t look at the couch. Don’t look at anything that remembers you back. By the time I turn onto our old street I’ve got my face arranged into neutral and my heart rate almost believing it.
The house looks the same as I left it. Same manicured lawn, same perfectly trimmed hedges, same fountain in the circular driveway that I always thought was pretentious but Cameron insisted added “character.” I park in my old spot and sit with the engine ticking, steadying myself, before I can make my legs carry me to the door.
I still have the spare key from my glovebox, the one we kept for locked-out emergencies.
I left mine on the counter the day I walked out, but I never thought to surrender the spare, and now I’m grateful for that small oversight because it means I don’t have to knock.
The lawyers arranged an afternoon pickup for my things.
I came hours ahead of it on purpose, then texted the lawyer’s office from the driveway and pushed the pickup back a week, because today I only need one thing and I don’t want an audience for it.
I can slip in and slip out without a sound, like I was never here at all.
My key still turns like it was waiting. The foyer smells the same.
That’s what hits me first, before I’ve even closed the door behind me.
The specific combination of cleaning products and fresh flowers and something underneath that’s just this house, this life, this marriage I walked away from.
My chest tightens and I have to stop, one hand on the wall, breathing through the wave of memory.
I make it through the living room with my eyes forward, but the house doesn’t cooperate.
The couch is still angled toward the window because I liked the light in the mornings.
The spot on the floor where we used to dance is just floor, just hardwood, and it still takes everything I have to walk across it like it’s nothing.
I walk through the kitchen on my way to the office and stop cold.
Cameron is sitting on the floor, surrounded by wedding photos.
He’s got them spread out around him in a semicircle, glossy prints and framed portraits and the album we made together from our honeymoon.
He’s holding one of them, staring at it, and he doesn’t notice me standing in the doorway.
I recognize the photo from here. Our first dance.
My veil is crooked because he stepped on it during the dip, and we’re both laughing so hard the photographer almost missed the shot.
I used to keep it on my nightstand. I don’t know when it migrated to a box.
I stand in the doorway for longer than I should, watching my husband sit on the floor of the kitchen where he promised me forever, holding our first dance in both hands.
He looks smaller than I’ve ever seen him.
He looks like what’s left after the suit and the schedule and the empire are subtracted, and what’s left is just a man in an empty house with a box of proof that he used to be happy.
“Cameron.”
He scrambles to his feet, photos scattering. “Hannah. I didn’t think - your lawyer’s office said afternoon-”
“I came early.”
We stare at each other across the kitchen, across the photos scattered between us like fallen leaves.
“I was looking for the moment I started losing you,” he says quietly. “I thought maybe if I could find it, I could understand how to fix it. But it’s not there. It happened so slowly, so gradually. I didn’t even notice until you were gone.”
“Cam…”
“Your stuff’s in the office. I haven’t touched anything.” His voice breaks. “I couldn’t. It still smells like your shampoo.”
I should leave. Grab the hard drive. Walk out.
But the house is full of ghosts wearing my face. Hannah laughing in the kitchen. Hannah dancing in the living room. Hannah wrapped in Cameron’s arms on the couch, so certain she’d found her forever.
“Do you remember our first fight in this house?” I hear myself say.
“You wanted yellow walls. I said it would look like we lived inside an egg.”
“We compromised on sage green.”
“You hated it.”
“I did.” A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, small and rusty. “Five years of cooking dinner in a room the color of a hospital hallway. I used to fantasize about repainting it while you were in Singapore.”
“You should have.”
“I know.” And there it is, the whole marriage in three words. “I let you win.” I move toward him without meaning to. “I always let you win. Because I loved you too much to fight.”
“You did.” He catches my hand as I pass him, his fingers curling around mine. “And I collected every one of those wins like I’d earned them.”
“Cam…”
“I don’t deserve another chance. I know that.”
I kiss him.
Partly to shut him up. Partly because I can’t help it.
Partly because grief and want live in the same room in me now and I’ve stopped being able to tell which one is talking.
Partly because standing here in this kitchen, surrounded by photos of who we used to be, I can’t remember why I’m supposed to be strong.
The moment my lips touch his, something breaks open.
All the grief and the anger and the desperate, stupid hope I’ve been trying to kill for months.
His hands go to my face, cupping my jaw like I’m something precious, and I grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer because there’s no point in half measures, not anymore, not when I’ve already ruined everything by wanting him.
“Wait-” He pulls back, breathing hard, his forehead pressed against mine. “If you don’t want this-”
“Shut up.” I pull him down again. “I want.”
We stumble toward the bedroom, shedding clothes as we go, my cardigan on the kitchen floor, his shirt half-unbuttoned and abandoned in the hallway, a trail of evidence neither of us stops to think about.
He walks me backward with his mouth on mine and his hands steady at my waist, navigating the house we both know blind, and when my shoulders hit the doorframe he takes the impact with his palm before I feel it.
Five years of living here and he still puts his hand between me and every hard edge.
That’s the thing I could never explain to Summer.
He was careless with my heart and careful with my body, and both of those things were true at once, every single day.
The bed still has my pillows arranged the way I used to like them.
I shove him back onto the edge of the mattress and climb on, straddling him while our clothes are still half on.
His pants are open, cock already out and hard against my thigh.
I don’t wait. I push my own jeans down just far enough to free myself and sink onto him in one rough motion.
The stretch burns in the best way, sudden and deep. He groans, hands flying to my hips.
“Fuck, Hannah-”
“Harder. Make it hurt.”
I ride him fast and angry, bouncing on his cock while the bed creaks under us.
My cardigan is still on one shoulder. His shirt is open but still on.
Neither of us cares. I brace my hands on his chest and slam down again and again, taking what I need, what I’ve gone without.
He meets every thrust, hips snapping up, the sound of skin slapping skin filling the room.
His fingers dig into my ass, pulling me down harder.
I bite his shoulder when he says my name, dig my nails into his back when his hands slide lower. He takes all of it, absorbs every ounce of anger I’ve been carrying like it’s his to hold. Because it is. We both know it is.
The pace is brutal, frantic. I grind down, chasing the edge, and he reaches between us to rub my clit with rough fingers. “Look at me. Please. Just… let me see you.”
I slow for a second, eyes locking on his. What’s in them is so raw I almost can’t stand it. Grief and want and something that cracks me open.
“Don’t.” My voice breaks. “Don’t make this something it isn’t.”
“It’s everything,” he says simply, and then his mouth is on mine again.
The anger shifts. I stop slamming and start moving slower, deeper, rolling my hips so he stays buried inside me.
He wraps his arms around my back, holding me close, chest to chest. We rock together, face to face now, foreheads almost touching.
Every thrust is deliberate, like he’s trying to crawl inside me and stay there.
His cock drags against every sensitive spot and I clench around him, tears starting to sting my eyes.
“I missed you,” he says against my skin, voice wrecked. “Every day. Every hour. Every minute.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Hannah-”
“Don’t talk. Just feel.”
And he does. We both do. The slow grind turns devastating.
He kisses my cheeks where the tears fall, then my mouth, soft and desperate.
I come first, body locking up around him, a broken sound tearing out of me as the orgasm hits hard and quiet.
He follows right after, coming hard and deep inside me while he holds me tight, shaking against my chest.
We stay like that, still joined, neither of us moving, the anger burned away into something rawer.
Afterward, I lie there watching the shadows shift across the ceiling while he sleeps beside me, one arm thrown across my waist, his breathing slow and even.
In sleep, his face loses the careful control he’s been wearing for months, and he looks younger.
He looks like the man who danced with me while the pasta burned.
I catalog his face like I’m packing it into the last box: the line between his brows that never fully smooths anymore, the gray at his temples, the mouth that just said my name like a prayer.
For one long, dangerous minute I let myself imagine staying. Waking up here. Trying again.
Then I remember the candles burning down to stubs, and the phone that always won, and I make myself move.
I slip out before dawn.
I dress in the dark, find the office by memory, and take the hard drive I came for off the shelf where it’s waited all these months, one small piece of my own work carried out of a house that kept everything else.
In the kitchen, the junk drawer still sticks the way it always did, and the pen is still in it, because some things in this house never change and none of them are the things that mattered.
On his pillow, I leave a note. My second note in one marriage.
That was goodbye. Sign the papers.
I write it three times before my handwriting stops shaking. The first two drafts go into my pocket, because I know him now, know he’d read a tremble as hope.
I drive through empty streets as the sun comes up, burning up gray and then gold over a city that has no idea what I’ve done. In my rearview mirror, the house gets smaller and smaller until it disappears around a corner.
My hands won’t stop shaking on the wheel, and I grip it tighter, and they shake anyway.
The hard drive sits on the passenger seat like a passenger.
At a red light I catch my own eyes in the mirror, smudged and swollen and awake all night, and I say it out loud to the empty car because somebody has to say it and there’s nobody left but me.
“That was goodbye.”
And I know, I know, that was the last time. It has to be.