Page 18 of My Sweetest Agony

Because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about Cam being here.

We never even met when Drew and I were together, never spoke a word to each other via phone, never exchanged Christmas or birthday cards. He was always this person who should have been the most important one in Drew’s life but who had somehow become a pariah.

But it would have been impossible not to see how much it pained him when Nancy brought up Cam during our time spent with her. Or to ignore the times I found Drew sitting in the dim light in his office, staring at a photo he would surreptitiously slide into his drawer as soon as I entered the room—one of the two of them with their mom that couldn’t have been taken long before he and I got together.

All this time, Cam has been an enigma.

The mysterious “other half” of the man I loved.

And now he’s just here.

And Drew is gone.

“Ivy? Are you all right?”

Shit.

My lids fly open, and Cam stands only a few feet from me, his brow deeply furrowed as he assesses me with eyes now filled with concern in a way that reminds me so much of how Drew looked when he was in “doctor mode” that I have to swallow a sob.

“I’m fine.”

Another forced smile.

A deep breath.

I give him my back as I shut the door, offering myself a few precious seconds to try to gather some semblance of control over my volatile emotions.

“If you want me to leave?—”

“No.” I whirl to face him so fast it makes my head spin—or maybe that’s because I have barely been able to bring myself to eat anything since Drew’s death. “Please. I’m just tired. It’s fine.”

Cam doesn’t look fully convinced, his gaze roving over me in a way that feels somehow both clinical and profoundly invasive at the same time. “Are you sleeping?”

Of course not.

Eating. Sleeping. Breathing. It all feels so impossibly hard.

Every single day is utterly exhausting just being here without him.

If anyone might be able to understand my agony, it would be Cam, but this is the same man who didn’t speak to his brother for four years, who couldn’t even be bothered to come to his funeral, who is lying to his grieving mother about still being in London instead of here in Philly where he could offer her some comfort and support.

So, I bite back those truths that sit on the tip of my tongue.

The best thing to do is give him what he needs and let him get on with…whatever it is he does that keeps him so busy that he couldn’t show for the service.

I push past him into the living room and lead him to the first closed door on the left in the small hallway that leads back to the bedrooms. He follows slowly, his eyes sweeping over the house now that he can see it in the daylight.

Each step he takes ratchets up my anxiety. Every booted footfall on the hardwood floors seems to echo in the tense silence between us. But it isn’t merely about having a Drew look-alike in this house; it’s about the fact that I haven’t had the courage to open this door since the day Drew died.

This was his place.

Where he went to decompress after a bad shift or when he simply needed some time alone.

I do the same with the greenhouse.

Something about digging my hands into the dirt and the scent of all the flowers, the vibrancy of the life there, always seems to pull me out of whatever mood I might be in.

But I haven’t been able to enter Drew’s space. Haven’t been able to bring myself to see that desk and know he’ll never sit behind it again. To look at the couch he used to lie on with a book in his hand and a beer on the coffee table, relaxing on a day off, and have to accept it’s going to remain empty.