Page 3 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Three

I get home past two o’clock and don’t turn any lights on.

Nate stayed downtown—whether with his bandmates or that woman, I don’t know—and I went home to the house we’ve shared for the last four years.

A historic wood-and-stone cabin in the mountains (if you can call something a cabin at five thousand square feet and six bedrooms).

With its wraparound porch and stained-glass windows and vaulted, gnarled-beam ceilings, it’s my happiest place.

A home that Nate’s almost never in, that feels like it’s mine as much as my own face, my own fingernails.

It was nearly ninety degrees in Denver, where August’s always sticky and sweltering. But up in Estes Park the evenings are cool all summer long, and when I step out of my car in our smooth driveway it’s clear and breezy. It smells like pine trees. The stars are otherworldly bright.

I kick off my sandals inside the front door and walk through every room of the house: moonlight coming in through the tall windows, whispers of wallpaper and doorframes under my fingertips. Trying to memorize every piece of it. Trying to imagine my life anywhere else.

Seriously? Nate had said, when I told him I wanted the house.

That’s really all you have to say? Not an answer to whether I could keep it, and it was all I’d had to say, at least right then.

His words from the stadium are still swirling through me: What did you honestly expect?

We’ve been so scared to call this what it is .

I would never have admitted it to him, that he was right.

That it’s been at least a year—longer, probably—since Nate and me have been Nate and me.

We settled so invisibly into our shared but separate lives that I can’t see the seam, looking back.

The line where things changed. I only know that they did: that Nate had become my long-term plan by default, not choice, and that there was a part of me—not insignificant—that stayed with him only to prove something to myself.

That I’m capable of an everlasting relationship.

That I’m settled and grown-up and taken care of.

That I’m, maybe most of all, not like my mother.

It was unfair to him, to hold on for reasons like that. But now we’re here, more than even in our unfairness. I’m insulted and humiliated and relieved.

The house had been Nate’s idea, out of college.

The front door alone looked like it cost more than my entire Boulder apartment—all burled wood and brass hardware.

There was one of those copper, wall-mount thermometers on the porch, and a cluster of aspens in the front yard, and a storybook gate that led around back to the flower garden.

It was gorgeous: stone paths winding between rows of mountain lupine and purple columbines.

You could see clear to Longs Peak from anywhere you stood.

The house belonged in Architectural Digest , not in my life.

Nate grew up in a low-slung suburb of Denver, in a small brick bungalow with two brothers.

Every summer his family drove up to Estes Park and camped for a full week: the only vacation they could afford.

The house was down the street from the ice cream shop he’d go to with his brothers, the three of them tumbling over each other on the weed-cracked sidewalk.

It was lodged in Nate like an old splinter—the way only things from our childhood get stuck in us.

It was more than a house, to him; it was an idea.

One that, after a record deal and a national tour, he could afford to rent for himself.

It didn’t make much difference to me, where we landed.

The splinters of my own childhood had only ever pushed me in one direction: away.

I’d never go back to Ohio, but pretty much anywhere else seemed fine.

I was two days past graduation and starting an online master’s program in the fall.

I had an empty summer spread before me, a plan for the future, a twenty-two-year-old boy holding my hand.

When he tugged me through the front door of his dream house, I went willingly.

Nate gave me creative control over the house (within reason—we were renters).

The landlord, a man named Henry I never met, lived in town but didn’t come by.

So long as we didn’t do anything obnoxious, Nate said, we could pretty much do what we wanted.

With Nate gone so often—on tour, or out of town for press, or staying in Denver for weeklong stints to record with the band—his dream house ultimately became mine.

I painted the kitchen a woodsy green and installed vintage light fixtures; I themed each bedroom after a Colorado plant—pine, spruce, lupine, juniper, aspen, fir; I applied peel-and-stick wallpaper in the attic office, where a bay window looked out over the back garden.

There was already help for the garden by the time we moved in, a woman named Joss who came by most summer afternoons to manage our small wilderness.

It was just as well; I’ve always been an indoor cat.

I wouldn’t have known what to do with the yard, and Joss worked magic out there.

On nice days we’d drink lemonade on the porch together when she was through; she was only in her midthirties, and a great storyteller.

With Nate gone and all my college friends over an hour away in Denver, it was nice to have Joss around. For the garden, and for me.

There weren’t close neighbors. Each house sat on a wooded lot that elk roamed through at will, grazing on pine needles and bunches of lichen.

The house across the street was nearest, a stately cabin where a retired couple from Kansas—Martina and Bill—lived with their old St. Bernard, Custard.

He was enormous, bearlike, all droopy jowls and soulful eyes.

When Nate was home we cooked the kinds of simple foods twenty-three-year-olds tend to: pasta with cherry tomatoes from the yard, burgers that Nate grilled on the gas range on the back porch.

We went barefoot everywhere and christened every room of the house the way twenty-three-year-olds also do.

Nate was gone so often that having him home always felt like Christmas morning: a fleeting, frantic gift.

I felt like I could’ve sustained myself on Nate alone, never mind the pasta and the burgers.

His mouth and the inner curves of his elbows and the warm skin of his belly pressed to mine.

The weight of him. He was always a meal enough for me.

And then he’d be gone again, kissing me on the front steps while Kenji honked at us from the road.

When school or clinical hours prevented me from traveling with him, he’d send me a video of “Purple Girl” after every single show.

“This one’s for Lou,” he’d always say. And, eventually, “You all know who this one’s for.

” And, after that, only, “Sing along if you know the words.”

I missed Nate when he left. Especially at the start.

But the longer I lived in the house, the more I missed it, too, when I was away.

If something prevented me from touring with him, it was always tinged with a bit of relief.

I wouldn’t have to leave my home, my beautiful refuge in the mountains.

I wouldn’t have to wake up without the stained glass above the kitchen sink casting my morning flickering rainbow; I wouldn’t have to fall asleep without the hush of aspen boughs caressing my bedroom window.

Goldie and I never stayed in one place for long—growing up was a blur of rentals and motels and living rooms of my mother’s friends.

But this house felt like it was mine, more than any place had ever been.

When I whispered this to Nate, my lips at his ear in our quiet, mountain-ringed bedroom, he smiled sleepily in the dark.

It’s all for you, Lou , he said. I believed him implicitly.

Because I wanted to, because he’d never given me a reason to doubt him, because I’d loved him long before the rest of the world.

Eventually, the house stopped meaning, to Nate, what it had always meant.

Eventually, he had all the trappings of a life that anyone could want: rentals in Miami and Los Angeles and a transparent sapphire watch that cost more than my car.

It was a mark of the change in us, that the things that had always meant something more —the house, Estes Park, me—were just things again.

I’d intended to start working in the spring, after passing my National Counselor Examination and officially earning my license. But then there’d been the photo. That woman. And the fallout from all of it, leading like a trail of breadcrumbs to this night.

Instead I spent early summer languishing , as Goldie put it.

Reading books in my attic office and sitting in the garden with Joss and having weekend-long sleepovers with Mei, my best friend, when she could get away from Denver.

I’d let Nate sweep me under the wave of his life.

I’d done what Goldie always feared I’d do, what we grew up watching our mother do and be destroyed by: I let a man take care of me.

I’m not sure I even recognized it as it was happening—not really. The sands shifting beneath me, putting me flat on my back in the surf. And even as it all changed around me, I never thought I’d lose it.

I let myself believe—naively, foolishly—that this life was mine for the keeping.