20. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
The penthouse smells of dust and old cardboard, and underneath it, faintly, him.
“I don’t know why you kept all of this.” I drag a box marked MISC toward the windows, my arms burning with the weight of whatever memories he’s stuffed inside.
Wilson sets down a stack of frames and wipes his palms on his jeans, the denim worn soft at the knees. “Because throwing it away felt permanent. I wasn’t ready to admit anything was actually over between us.”
“You called the broker fast for a man worried about permanent.” I shove the box the last few inches and straighten up, pressing a hand into the ache blooming in my lower back.
He doesn’t answer that. He just lifts another box, sleeves shoved past his elbows, and carries it to the donation pile without meeting my eyes.
We’ve been at this most of the afternoon, sorting a marriage into keep and donate.
He called yesterday to ask if I’d help him clear the place before he lists it, and I said yes before he finished the question. Nobody said the word closure. He didn’t want to do it alone, and I didn’t want him to.
I came back to the city the week after Thanksgiving. The cottage is shuttered for winter, Gran’s pipes drained, the jewelry box in my bag. I’m staying in Mom’s guest room and renting a sublet studio in Bushwick with north light and a radiator that clangs.
I chose it on purpose. I haven’t told anyone why.
The woman who runs the little gallery two blocks from the studio saw the window paintings through my open door back in December and just stood in the hallway until I let her in.
She wants twelve pieces by spring. I have five.
I said yes anyway, because Gran would have come after me with a wooden spoon if I’d said no to something like that.
“You’ve gone quiet on me,” Wilson says, working a blade through packing tape, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m judging how you organized these.” I gesture at the chaos of boxes around us, labels that mean nothing scrawled in his handwriting. “It’s a disaster. I mean, who labels a box MISC? What does that even mean?”
The laugh blurts out of me halfway through the question and I can’t pull it back.
Wilson sets down the blade and crosses the room, and his next words arrive as a whisper right against my ear. “Says the woman who once labeled a moving box ‘stuff and things’ and expected me to decode it without any context.”
The whisper lands warm on my neck. I don’t have to turn around to know his eyes are crinkling the way they used to, back when that look belonged only to me.
“That was one time, and I was stressed and running on four hours of sleep because a certain person kept me up arguing about where to put the bookshelf.”
“One time, she says.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and waves it at me. “I have photos of three separate boxes, from three separate moves, every one of them labeled ‘stuff and things.’”
He’s grinning the way he grinned before any of this happened to us. Before Tokyo. Before the empty apartment and the papers we tore down the middle in my mother’s kitchen.
I throw a ball of newspaper at his head and he catches it without looking, his reflexes still annoyingly perfect after all these years.
“These are your mother’s.” I lift the porcelain birds out of their tissue one by one, tiny painted flowers on every wing.
She showed them to me the Christmas she came to visit us, since her husband wouldn’t have Wilson at his table.
She named the garden each flower came from while Wilson pretended not to notice the tears standing in her eyes.
“I know what they are, Izzy.” His jaw works once before he says it, and his hands stop moving on the box in front of him.
“Keep pile, obviously, unless you’ve lost your mind.”
“Whatever you say, boss.” He tries to smile. It doesn’t get anywhere near his eyes.
I wrap each bird in fresh tissue, handling them the way his mother handled them, and keep digging through the layers of our shared history.
Frames I don’t examine too closely, because I’m not ready to see our faces smiling back at me.
A crystal decanter from his aunt, who overspent on people she barely knew.
The brass lamp I’ve hated since the day he dragged it through our door.
“Toss the lamp,” he says, moving closer to peer over my shoulder.
“I’ve hated this lamp since the day you hauled it home from that estate sale swearing it would make the room look homey.” I hold it up and the tarnish catches the window light, ugly as ever.
“I know you hated it with every fiber of your being.” He reaches around me for the donation box, his arm brushing mine.
My whole body wakes up whether I want it to or not.
“Honestly? I just bought it because it pissed you off. You know how I like to ragebait you.”
“Everything you owned made me mad back then, Wilson.”
“You loved my records, and don’t try to deny it.”
“I tolerated your records because they came attached to you.” I push the lamp into his hands.
The honesty slips out on its own.
“And because you were cute when you listened to them. Eyes closed, head tipped back, conducting an orchestra only you could hear.” I shrug like it’s nothing. “I used to watch you instead of reading my book.”
He goes still, the lamp forgotten in his grip. “Seven years and I’m only hearing this now?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Wilson.”
He laughs, low and warm, and the sound settles under my ribs and refuses to leave no matter how many times I tell it to go. I shove a box of magazines at the donation pile and pull the next one closer, needing a job for my hands that isn’t reaching for him.
No label on this one. The tape is yellowed, cracked at the edges, years old and untouched.
“What’s in this one?” I trace the brittle adhesive with one finger.
Wilson doesn’t move for a long beat, his shoulders going tight under his shirt. “Open it and find out.”
The tape peels back with a soft rip, and dust drifts up through the golden afternoon light.
Paintings.
My paintings.
Small canvases from our first year together, from when I still believed I could be an artist in the gaps between loving him, working two jobs, and paying my half of everything we built. A woman in red walking through rain, her face turned away from the viewer.
My grandmother’s window at the cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, curtains lit from inside, painted from memory of all those summers I spent there as a child.
Two hands reaching across a worn kitchen table, fingers not quite touching.
“These are mine,” I whisper, and it cracks down the middle.
“You left them behind when you moved out.” He crouches beside me, his knee pressing warm against my thigh.
“I forgot they even existed.”
“I didn’t forget anything about you, Izzy.” His voice drops low and private. “Not a single thing.”
Under the canvases sits my old leather journal, fat with ticket stubs from our first dates and the pressed flowers from the bouquet he bought me when I sold my first piece for three hundred dollars and cried in the bathroom of the gallery.
There’s a manila folder tucked beneath the journal, unlabeled, soft at the edges from handling.
I open it and my breath stops.
Notes. Dozens of them. Every note I ever tucked into his luggage before a trip, folded into his carry-on or slipped between his shirts when he wasn’t looking.
Have a safe flight.
I’ll miss you.
Come home to me.
He never mentioned finding them. I stopped writing them after year three because I thought he never read them, thought they went into hotel trash cans without a second glance.
He kept every single one.
My hands shake hard enough to rattle the paper. My throat goes hot and tight.
“Wilson, you kept these?”
“Yeah, of course I kept them.” He moves closer and looks over my shoulder at the folder, his chin almost resting there. “I was always gone, and finding one in my bag made me miss you less. It was nice knowing you were thinking about me, you know?”
“You never told me that though.” I flip through the stack and my own handwriting blurs. “I thought you never even saw them.”
“No, I saw all of them.” He reaches past me and pulls out a note near the bottom, yellowed with age, and smiles a little at it.
“You remember Frankfurt? That awful delay? I found this one in my jacket pocket. I must have read it ten times, sitting in that airport waiting for the plane to get fixed.”
I take it from him and unfold it with clumsy fingers.
Miss you already. The bed is too big without you. Hurry home.
There’s a little heart drawn in the corner, because I was twenty-four and still drew hearts on things.
“I stopped writing them because I figured you didn’t care.” It comes out smaller than I want it to. “You never brought them up, so I assumed they went straight in the trash.”
“I cared a lot. I just never said anything about it.” He turns me toward him gently, and his face is open and sad.
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know.” He looks down at the note in my hand instead of at me. “I’d be sitting on some plane missing you and I’d think, I should tell her how much I love getting these.”
“And then?”
“Then I’d land. Work would take over. I’d forget.” He shrugs, and it’s a small, ashamed movement. “And then too much time had passed and it felt weird to bring it up out of nowhere.”
“We never really talked about stuff like that, did we?” The tears are coming now and I can’t stop them. “That was our whole problem. We just didn’t talk.”
“No, we didn’t.” He wipes my cheek with his thumb. “But I should have. I should have told you every single time how much those notes meant to me. I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
“I spent years thinking you didn’t notice me.” I’m crying harder now and my voice is shaking. “I thought none of it mattered to you, Wilson.”
“It all mattered.” He pulls me in, wraps his arms around me tight, and talks into my hair. “You were the whole reason I wanted to come home. I was just really bad at saying it.”