She turns to look at me directly, her blue eyes clear and certain. “But I’m not keeping it the way it was.”
The air between us shifts. Something electric, charged, bigger than the desk and the back room and the paint on our clothes. My chest tightens, my throat works, and behind my sternum, three words rise up like they’ve been waiting there for months, maybe years, patient and inevitable.
I love you.
They sit on my tongue, ready. I open my mouth.
And close it.
Swallow.
Say nothing.
Maddie watches my face. She doesn’t push, doesn’t fill the silence. She just waits, her hand warm in mine, her eyes steady on mine in the dim light of the back room, and the unsaid thing sits between us, not heavy, not painful, just present. Real. Waiting for its moment.
Chapter 13
The video call notification chimes from my laptop at 7:03 PM, which gives me exactly negative two seconds to decide if I’m ready, because I’ve been sitting here since six-forty-five with my hair in a messy bun and Drew’s old flannel buttoned to the collar, and the answer is obviously no, but my finger hovers over the trackpad anyway.
My living room looks different tonight. Not wildly different; I haven’t hauled in a disco ball or painted the ceiling chartreuse (yet), but the farmhouse table is angled now, the couch has been dragged three feet to the left to catch the better light, and the print above the mantel is propped against the wall instead of hanging, waiting for me to decide if it stays or goes. Little rebellions. Evidence that I live here, not that I’m just visiting someone else’s life.
I click accept before I can chicken out.
Their faces appear on my screen, pixelated for half a second before smoothing into the familiar sight of my former in-laws. Drew’s mom with her silver hair swept into a loose knot, his dad beside her in his reading chair, the Arizona afternoon sun painting their living room wall a gentle gold behind them. They look exactly the same as they did last month, which is both comforting and somehow unfair, because I feel like I’ve aged approximately seven years since then.
“Hi, honey,” his mom says, and her voice has that particular warmth that makes my chest do something complicated, half ache, half relief.
“Hi.” I tuck my feet further under me on the couch. “You guys look good. The light’s nice.”
“Your hair’s different,” his dad says, squinting. Always cutting to the chase, that man.
“I cut two inches off the bottom last week. It was getting in the paint.”
His mom smiles. “It suits you.”
We do the oh-so-familiar dance as always; they ask about the store, about Melvin’s latest grumble, about whether the zucchini is staging another hostile takeover in the garden. I answer on autopilot, my thumb tracing the edge of the laptop, counting down the seconds until I have to say the thing I came here to say.
I’ve rehearsed this speech twice in the bathroom mirror. The speech has three neatly organized parts with transitions. Very professional.
The problem is, now that I’m here, the speech sounds stupid in my head. Rehearsed. Like I’m presenting a business plan instead of telling the people who loved Drew that I’m rebuilding my life without him at its center.
So I scrap the speech.
“I’m keeping the store,” I say. The words come out clean, no wobble. “But I’m changing it. New workshops, community stuff, a repair service. It’s not going to be the same place.”
His dad nods once, slow. His mom’s eyes don’t leave the screen.
“I’m selling the house eventually,” I continue. My throat feels tight, but my voice holds. “Not because I’m running. Not because I need to get away from... from him. From Drew. But because I want to choose my own home someday. One that’s mine from the ground up.”
The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. Not heavy, exactly. More like the quiet after you’ve set downsomething you’ve been carrying for a long time, and the absence of the weight is its own strange presence.
His dad leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at the camera with those steady eyes that have seen sixty-some Vermont winters and came out the other side with their sense of humor intact. “That store was never meant to be a shrine, Maddie.”
It lands exactly the way a truth should: not gentle, not cruel, just factual. Like he’s telling me the sky is blue, or the pipes will freeze if I don’t wrap them by November. That store was never meant to be a shrine. Of course it wasn’t. I’ve known that, somewhere under the grief and the guilt and the three years of keeping the lights on out of sheer stubbornness, but hearing it from him—from the man who watched his son build that place from the ground up—cuts the last thread of doubt I didn’t even know was still holding.
His mom’s hand moves toward the screen, a small, instinctive gesture, like she’s reaching through the pixels to touch my face. Her voice catches, just for a second, before she smooths it over. “Loving Jordan doesn’t take anything away from what you and Drew had,” she says. “It never could.”
Something in my chest cracks open, warm and vast. I don’t cry. I should cry…this is the crying part of the movie, the scene where the widow finally lets it all out, and the music swells, but instead, I just sit there on my rearranged couch, in my cut-off hair and Drew’s flannel, and feel my jaw loosen for the first time in what might be years. My shoulders drop a half-inch. I didn’t realize they were up around my ears until they weren’t.
