Page 67 of What You left in Me

“On our way.”

I hang up. The quiet builds pressure again and I dress like I’m late for a life I want to keep: jeans, white tee, cardigan that screams “I love used bookstores and boundaries,” sneakers. I twist my hair up, swipe concealer under eyes that want to confess, and pat my pockets, phone and credit card.

In my head I keep seeing the thread on Julian’s phone… blue and gray bubbles like a smug little parade.Still thinking about the elevator.314 again.Delete this.Sunshine. Sunshine. Sunshine. That’s the part that loops, like he had to bend language around a stranger because he didn’t know what to call what he was doing. Meanwhile I was fifteen feet away holding my mother up and he was thinking about elevators. My body keeps reacting like there’s a physical drop under my feet when I remember. Useless, stubborn, human body.

But I’m such a traitor. I can’t get mad at him. Not when I being finger fucked by my step-brother in the hallway while he patiently waited for me. Fuck. Fuck,fuck.

As I step out from my room into the kitchen, I find Finn at the island in a T-shirt and boxers, hair a quiet war zone, pouring coffee into a mug like the ritual will make it taste decent. Morning cuts across his shoulders and the casino of my chest goes noisy. I look at the stainless kettle instead. It’s very heroic of me.

He glances up, reads the seriousness on my face in a heartbeat, and sets the mug down. “Your mother?”

“Called. Doctor wants to update. Not code red but ‘get here now or I will invent a new tone of voice you won’t like,’” I say. The joke is cheap; I’m allowed a cheap joke before eight a.m.

He starts moving. There are people who need a list and people who just go. He’s the second. He checks his phone forkeys and texts, already scanning paths in his head I don’t have to ask about. Parking, entrance... The sudden swell of gratitude is annoying and real.

He rounds the island and stops a little too close. I can smell coffee and soap and the ghost of clove from his aftershave. My brain, helpful as always, throws up a highlight reel from last night. I pin my eyes to the fruit bowl. A banana bears the brunt of my restraint.

“I’ll be ready in five,” he says, steady as a metronome. “Do you want to drive?”

“If my hands aren’t doing something productive, they’ll punch drywall or text Julian a paragraph I’ll regret,” I say. “So yes. Driving sounds like public service.”

I walk out before I apologize to him for a disaster we built together with our eyes open. Some apologies need a different room, a different day, a different version of me.

The gallery swallows sound. Our house… our parents’ house, technically, but it’s hard to separate a place from the years you survived inside it.

As I step out, I look around at the peaceful morning and shake my head.Perfect. Even the weather’s mocking me.I slide into the driver’s seat. The dash wakes up like a spaceship that wants to be helpful. I don’t start the engine yet. I hold the wheel and practice being a person who can sit still for ten seconds without combusting.

The list of everything I don’t have time to feel is long and loud:

Julian. The shock has edges. I hate the part of me that wants him to have cheated better, because what does that even mean? “Better” like…honestly? No, not honestly. Respectfully? You can’t cheat respectfully. That’s not a thing. Ikeep remembering his face when he looked at the thread. Thesurpriselike even he didn’t expect to be that guy. Maybe he didn’t. People are full of rooms they pretend don’t exist until a door swings open and there they are, standing in one, blinking.

Finn.Last night. His hands. His words. His slaps. My body still aches from everything we did last night. But I refuse to dissect it in a parked car like a scientist who lost her funding. But it’s there. It keeps rolling through on a loop that only stops when I bully it. I don’t know what to call it. Calling it a mistake feels like I’m lying to make myself manageable. Not calling it anything feels like another lie.

Richard. The hospital light on his skin. The way his laugh tries to show up and then gets lost. He’s the axis of a lot of bad history and also the person who taught me how to make the perfect omelet on Sunday mornings when the house was quiet and we could pretend. People aren’t math. They’re mess. He’s mine anyway. I need him to stay.

Mom. Lipstick like armor. That scary-bright tone she uses when she’s terrified. The way her hand shook last week when she reached for water and she pretended it was nothing and so did I because sometimes love is giving someone’s lie a chair to sit on. The man from the hospital. One week. The word pressed into us like a stamp we can’t wash off. I can feel the clock already, ticking in the baseboards.

And me.My good-girl spine and my bad-idea hands. The version of me that can organize a disaster and the one who just wants to stop being the polite shape of herself for five minutes. The worst part: I can feel both at once. It’s like trying to stand with one foot on a boat and the other on a dock. You can do it. For a while. Then you split your jeans.

The front door opens and I hear quick steps across the gallery. He always moves like a person who knows whereeverything is with the lights out. He’s dressed now in dark jeans, black tee, hair refusing to obey basic societal norms, sneakers in his hand so he can put them on at the threshold. The ordinary intimacy of it is a knife and a hug.

He pulls the passenger door open and leans down. “Keys?”

I hold up the fob. “Already ready.”

He sees my face, reads all the weather in about two seconds, and goes with neutral. “Hospital bag?”

“In the back.” I point. I packed it last night when sleep looked at me and decided to try someone else. Toothbrush, charger, snacks Mom will accept and not lecture.

“Good.” He ties his shoes on the step like we’re heading out to walk a dog instead of into a life we’ve set on fire and a family we’re trying to keep from noticing the smoke. “Ames is usually on rounds at eight-thirty,” he says, glancing at his phone. “We’ll catch him if we leave now.”

“Right.” I start the engine. My hands stop shaking because they finally have something tangible to do.

Finn closes the door and jogs around. I watch him in the mirror because I’m an idiot who can’t stop staring.

“Ready?” he asks.

No. “Yes.”