Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 63915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
For the next hour, nothing happens. I text Jenni a photo of the ridiculous cereal I let myself buy because I was brave at the register, and she sends back a voice note that’s half cackle, half bring me some. I wipe the counters that don’t need wiping. I fold the towels that didn’t really need folding. I hum.
The phone buzzes in my back pocket.
I freeze.
Favorites only. It has to be one of them. I’m already smiling when I pull it out, already ready to say something cute about cereal to make Jenni laugh twice.
Unknown number.
The smile drops off my face. My thumb hovers. I don’t answer this time. I watch it buzz. It stops. Buzzes again. Stops. Again. A minute later, voicemail dings.
I don’t listen. Not right away. I put the phone face down on the counter like if I can’t see it light up, then it’s not. I rinse an apple. I bite it. The tartness makes my jaw ache. I chew and swallow and feel like a person trying to act like they don’t know there’s a bomb in the room.
“Fine,” I whisper to no one. “Fine.”
I put the voicemail on speaker and set the phone by the sink.
Silence. Then breath.
Then, in a voice like dirty velvet: “You smell like lemons and laundry soap. Blue tank. White shoes. Saw you at the eggs. Missed a crack. You always were careless.”
The call cuts. The room hums.
I grip the edge of the counter until my knuckles show. The world goes tight around the edges, white as the rim of a plate.
And then—I do nothing.
I don’t call Tommy. I don’t call Jenni. I don’t run. I stand in my kitchen and breathe because I refuse to let a ghost phone turn me back into a person who lives through a peephole.
“This is my house,” I say out loud, to the lemon cleaner beside the sink, to the crooked lampshade Tommy won’t fix because I love it even though I think it drives him crazy, to the coffee mug that says Sober is Sexy because Jenni has no chill. “You don’t get to be in here.”
I turn the phone off and slide it in the drawer with the potholders.
Then I put on music and start a sauce that takes three hours because it makes the house smell like something that gets better the longer it goes.
If the past wants a war, it can wait its turn.
Tommy comes home sweaty and happy, with dust on his forearms and a look that says he convinced a client to stop asking stupid questions and let him build the thing right. I meet him at the door, kiss him long enough he forgets whatever punchline he came in with, and shove a spoon of sauce into his mouth when he tries to talk.
“Holy—” He blinks. “Marry me.”
“Language,” I admonish. When I first got out of rehab, talking about the future scared me. Words like marry sent me into a spiral. I was living day to day, sometimes minute by minute to beat back cravings. I couldn’t think ahead. So it has become our joke that future talks are worse than cuss words.
He laughs and tucks me under his arm and for ten whole minutes I don’t think about a voice that knows where my tattoo sits. We eat on the back steps again. He tells me we should go north this weekend, and I pretend to consider like it isn’t already my favorite direction.
“I’ll pack a bag,” I tease. “You bring the bacon.”
“Impossible to—”
“—overbuy it,” I finish with him, and he grins like this is our vow.
Night slides in easy. The phone stays off in a drawer. The world contracts to this: his hand on my knee, my head on his shoulder, the crickets yelling at each other in the hedges like they’re arguing about sports. When we go to bed, I’m tired in the good way again.
And still—when the house goes dark, the room goes quieter than the day ever does, a little voice scrapes its way up my throat. Tell him.
It isn’t the mean voice. It’s the one that’s saved me more times than I know by making me use my words before my brain convinces me to shut up to be small.
I roll toward him. “Tommy?”
“Mm?” He’s half-asleep already; it’s his superpower.
The words park behind my teeth, engines idling. I picture the calls. The eggs. The way he will go still and quiet and then burn so hot he’ll melt the phone tower. I picture Virginia, the way his eyes shine when he says north, the way he’s been vibrating around me like he ate a secret. I picture our weekend of quiet together and decide to wait to share with him what’s happening.
“Do you want the green duffel or the black one?” I ask instead, being both coward and strategist in the same breath.