Page 225 of ClickBack

“I can sit on the porch. Got a call to return anyway.” He takes my bag from where I set it on the step. “If you want me to leave, say that. I’d rather be close.”

I look at him. “The porch is fine.”

He takes my hand, and we walk to the car.

At my house, he lets me unlock the door, then bends to kiss me before I go inside. I hear him speaking to Cam outside a few minutes later. His voice carries through the screen, ordinary and occupied. I am grateful I don’t have to feel him waiting on my grief.

The house looks exactly as it did when we left. Rae hasn’t lived here in years. Zion’s overnight things are still upstairs. There is no sensible reason to stand in the kitchen unable to remember why I came into it.

Then I see the cereal he likes on top of the refrigerator.

I bought the large box because it was on sale. I remember calculating how many weekends it would last, whether I should get two, whether he would have decided he hated it before he got to the second one. I put my hand on the counter and cry over a sale I was pleased with four days ago.

When I can move, I go upstairs. I straighten nothing. In Rae’s old room, I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the spot where her dresser used to stand. We painted over it years ago. I can still place the mirror, the little dish she kept earrings in, the burn she left in the carpet with a curling iron and blamed on something electrical.

I knew what happened. I let her think I didn’t.

That memory makes me smile, which makes me cry again.

Downstairs, I open the drawer for a pen. I want to put the day of my first visit on the calendar. Under the takeout menus is the realtor’s card I saved and never did anything with. I turn it over. The number is still there. The woman’s handwriting is much more confident than I felt when I took it.

I leave it on the counter and write Charlotte on the calendar.

Jarrett is looking at his phone when I open the door. He puts it away and gets up.

“Come inside,” I tell him.

He follows me into the kitchen. I take two plates from the cabinet for the sandwiches Ms. Kandy sent home, then stop with them in my hands.

“Gavin died before Rae was born.”

Jarrett looks at me.

“The boy Byron brought up. He died that August. He was twenty.”

He takes the plates and sets them on the counter.

“And she didn’t know?”

“I told her he wasn’t around. Then I kept telling her that when she was old enough to ask what it meant.”

I tell him about the accident, the funeral I didn’t attend, the aunt who knew about me. Not every detail Rae and I went through. Enough that he knows what I did, including the questions I answered in ways that kept her from asking the right one.

He listens without touching me. I thought that would frighten me more than it does.

“Why didn’t you tell her later?” he asks.

“Because she loved Byron. Because I didn’t know how to bring it up. Because it had already been so long.” I put my palms against the counter. “None of that was a reason she shouldn’t know. It was why I didn’t want to say it.”

“Did you think she’d go looking for his people?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

I look at him. “I thought they would turn her away. I thought I was saving her from how that felt.”

His expression changes, but he doesn’t tell me that I did the right thing. I don’t want him to.