Page 18 of Remain

This is why I’m here.

Not Erik.

Not The Christmas Kindness Drive.

Not Pineview nostalgia.

I’m here because after my mother died, everything became mine.

The paperwork. The decisions. The phone calls no one else returned.

My brother lives twenty minutes away and hasn’t set foot in this house in over a year. We don’t talk, not really anyways, save for the occasional half-hearted happy birthday text. We haven’t been the same since grief turned into resentment neither of us knew how to name.

My dad moved on faster than I could process, into a new relationship that came with occasional check-in texts and very little anything else.Hope you’re okay.Let me know if you need anything.

It was just me and my mom. Always. And now it’s just me, picking up all of the pieces.

“I’m not staying,” I say again, but the words sound different now, more resigned than defensive. “I’m here to sign. That’s it. Let’s just get through tomorrow.”

Aunt Carol studies me. “Is that what you told Erik?”

I swallow. “I didn’t tell him anything.”

“And that,” she says gently but firmly, “is how people get hurt.”

I turn toward her, frustration flaring hot and sudden. “I didn’t come back to reopen something. I came back to end something.”

She doesn’t argue.

Instead, she says quietly, “Erik already thinks this means more than it does. You know that boy has loved you since you were sixteen.”

“That’s not fair,” I quip back, my threshold already low anything could set me off.

“No,” she agrees. “It’s not fair. Life isn’t fair but neither is letting him believe this is the beginning when you know it’s the closing chapter.”

Silence stretches between us, thick with everything I don’t want to admit.

“He’s finishing the cart tonight,” she adds. “Without you. He told Mrs. Kincaid you had enough on your plate. Said you shouldn’t feel rushed. Said you should just be here with family.”

I close my eyes. I didn’t ask him to do that.

“I’m not doing this,” I say, sharper now.

Aunt Carol steps closer, her voice soft but unyielding. “Then don’t let him think he’s something you’re passing through too.”

After she leaves,the rental feels wrong.

It feels too quiet, but not the gentle kind. It feels hollow. It’s a quiet that echoes back at you when there’s nothing left to distract from what you’re avoiding.

I stand at the narrow kitchen sink long enough for the skyoutside the single window to go completely dark and absolute. My reflection stares back at me in the glass with my eyes rimmed with exhaustion, jaw locked tight, shoulders already braced like I’m about to take a hit I can’t duck.

December twenty-fourth.

I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly aware of how thin the walls are here and how absurd it is that I chose this place when my family is five minutes away, filling a house with laughter, nourishment and people who know exactly how to sit with grief without trying to fix it.

I tell myself this is practical, to have neutral ground, space to breathe and that tomorrow is just signatures, boxes and keys changing hands.

The truth presses in anyway. It always finds a way.