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Maybe that was the thing.

It was all a little bit profound to be thinking about that over a casserole.

It did seem to pair even better with the apple crisp his mom served after.

He cleared the table and brought the dishes into the kitchen, and decided that since dinner had been served to him, cleanup was his responsibility.

“You don’t need to do dishes,” his mother said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You made the apple crisp, and Rory and Lydia made dinner. I ought to do something.”

“I could pass out,” said Lydia, fanning herself vigorously. “The golden boy doing chores.”

He frowned.

Had he not done them before? He couldn’t remember.

“Did I not help when I lived with you guys before?”

His mother laughed. “You did plenty in other ways. But no.”

“No,” Lydia said right at the same time.

He and Cassidy had employed a cleaner, so neither of them had done much in the way of household chores. She had been responsible for dinner, though she usually had dinners brought from a local premium grocery store.

He hadn’t cared.

But it was just another way he hadn’t fully engaged with that life. With the moment.

Maybe neither of them had. They hadn’t cleaned their house or cooked their meals. Hadn’t done their own yard work.

They’d been busy with other things.

Other things that surrounded their life, but so rarely life itself.

The whole memory of putting together that bookcase came back to him. Because normally, they would’ve paid for assembly, but for some reason he had been bound and determined to do it. Maybe because he felt so useless in every other way.

He hadn’t been able to cope with the events anymore. He was being discharged, and he hadn’t known who he was.

He had been drowning in his addiction, and that water was six feet high and rising, and he hadn’t seen a way out.

He was trapped in it.

And he could see now that what he’d been doing was trying to go back and fix mistakes he’d made starting years earlier.

He was trying to be more present than he ever had been before, and he was trying to do that while he was already overwhelmed.

Hindsight on the situation never became less complicated.

Shit.

“Well,” he said. “I think I ought to do the dishes now.”

He went into the kitchen and started running water in the sink.

A second later, there was a hand on his shoulder.

He turned around and saw Rory. “I’ll help.”