Page 19 of Remain

We all grow up knowing, in some distant, abstract way, that this day will come. One day we’ll lose our mothers and wish for more time. It’s part of the bargain of loving someone so completely but it’s a grief you imagine arriving later, softened by decades, by a life already lived.

It’s something that belongs to your fifties, your sixties, your seventies, after long conversations and shared holidays and enough memories to steady you.

Not now. Not at twenty-six, when you’re still learning who you are, still reaching for the future with both hands, still expecting your mother to be there when you turn around.

I feel torn in half by it; the instinct to disappear when things hurt and the quieter pull toward people who would let me cry into a dish towel and still ask if I’ve eaten. I feel torn by the version of myself who learned to handle everything alone and the woman who is finally realizing she doesn’t have to.

Endings are louder right before Christmas. Standing there in a borrowed kitchen with borrowed quiet, it hits me thatI’ve been carrying this alone for so long, I don’t even remember how to set it down.

I hastily pack up the rental, swipe the car keys off the counter and head to the place where I know I am supposed to be tonight.

Where I need to be.

7

Erik

“Goodnight Erik! See you tomorrow!”

I lean against the hood of my truck and watch the last of the volunteers drift away, boots crunching softly against frozen pavement. I wish them goodnight and then lock up the community center doors myself.

Most people only see the lights, the decorations, the effort, the way the square tries so damn hard this time of year. They don’t see what happens after. They don’t experience the quiet that settles once everyone goes home. When Pineview can finally breathe.

Savannah left first.Of course she did.

She’s always been good at exits that are clean, quick, and almost polite. If she leaves gently enough, nothing will chase her.

I don’t take it personally.

That’s a lie.

I’ve known Savannah Joy before she learned how to leave and before she learned how to turn distance into ambition and ambition into armor. She used to sit on her mom’s front porch talking about everything and nothing at the same time, like she could hold the world in place just by naming it.

Her mother was like that too.

She was the kind of woman who made you feel seen without spectacle. She remembered names and asked questions she actually waited to hear the answers to. When Savannah talked, her mom listened like it mattered. When anyone spoke to her, she listened like it mattered.

Loving Savannah back then meant loving motion. It meant loving possibility and loving the parts of her that were never meant to stay contained, even when they scared the hell out of me. I knew, deep down, that one day those parts would take her somewhere I couldn’t follow.

Women have come and gone over the years. Some from Pineview. Some passing through. They have been warm, comforting and all lovely, teaching me lessons on how to be a better man even though it was never their responsibility. None of them were ever wrong. They just were never her.

They wanted certainty and a version of me that stayed neatly where it was. I could have given them that. For one of them, I thought about it long and hard. I stayed, after all. I built a life here.

Leaving has crossed my mind more times than I’ll admit.

I’ve imagined other cities with taller buildings and different skylines to take in. New women to explore and to devour. Places where no one knows who I was at eighteen or what I lost at twenty. I’ve imagined starting over somewhere anonymous, a brand new man filled with possibilities. I watched my brothers do it, every single one of them. Chasing more.

Then I imagine Savannah coming back and not finding me.

So, I stay.

Seeing her tonight did something to me I wasn’t prepared for.

Her eyes still give her away. I’d recognize those eyes anywhere. Now, they are deeper, darker and more aware.

I noticed everything.

The way she tensed when I stood too close and then relaxed a heartbeat later, like her body remembered before her mind could stop it. The way her breath hitched when I brushed past her in the aisle. The way her mouth parted when she was thinking, the way she pressed her lips together when she was bracing herself.