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Out there, some thirty miles south, was the city. I strained to hear it—the comforting rush of cars, crush of people—but I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t.
I washed my plate and fork by hand. Rhys had a dishwasher but I never used it. I wandered through the quiet house again. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Maybe I wasn’t looking for anything. Maybe I was just confirming that I really was alone.
In the tiny guest room, the new bed, dresser, and night table stood, ready for visitors. I tried to imagine Grin coming to visit. Tried to imagine saying, “Let me show you to the guest room.” It was absurd. Grin would laugh his ass off.
I found myself back in the living room, gazing at the bookshelves. It was pretty easy to tell my books from Rhys’s because mine were the sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks with white-slashed broken spines, half-torn-off covers, and yellow pages. I’d plucked some of them out of free boxes on the street, gotten some at library book sales, and picked some of them up off tables in cafés or benches at the train station where people had simply left them when they’d finished. One of my roommates had worked at a bookstore for a little while, and he’d brought home some stripped books for me—stock that didn’t sell got the covers torn off and shipped back to the publisher as proof rather than shipping the books themselves, but my roommate couldn’t bear to throw them away and rescued them instead.
I only kept the ones I thought I’d want to read again, leaving the others for people to pick up just as I had, so I hadn’t held on to that many.
Then there were the books of mine that were indistinguishable from Rhys’s. Books Rhys had bought me, bringing one home after he’d heard me mention it, or taking me to the bookstore on my birthday and telling me we weren’t leaving until I picked out two books I wanted. I’d balked when he’d tried to get me to buy more than that.
“I can only read one at a time,” I’d told him, and he’d given me a sly look like he thought I was being purposely difficult. But I didn’t want to have to choose among them. I wanted to enjoy getting to read a book without making any choice at all.
It was one of these that I slid off the shelf now. It was the most recent book he’d bought me, after hearing a friend of his rave about it as they killed time between takes in the studio. I’d read it twice, liking it so much I’d gotten to the end and flipped right back to the beginning to start it again.
I breathed in the clean smell of new paper and glue, and told myself that I was just appreciating how nice books smelled when they came from the bookstore instead of a free box and not trying to detect the scent of Rhys on the book—his hands as he’d chosen it and carried it home, his clothes as he’d grabbed it from me and teased me by shoving it under his shirt when I wouldn’t pay attention to him because I was reading, inviting me to come and get it.
But it just smelled like paper.
It was only nine, but I took the book upstairs, stripped out of my clothes, and climbed into my side of the bed. Even though it was warm, I pushed the blanket into a circle around me and turned on only the bedside lamp, like I was in a cocoon of light even as the house was dark and quiet around me.
I read for hours, until my eyelids started to droop. Then I shut off the light and pulled the covers around me, waiting for the familiar lassitude of our bed to take me. I stretched out my arm unthinkingly, for Rhys, but of course he wasn’t there.
Suddenly I was wide awake. I pulled Rhys’s pillow over and held on to it, squeezing my eyes shut because with closed eyes the darkness disappeared. I counted the seconds.
This is what it feels like to be alone again. Remember?
I pushed the thought aside. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t that person anymore. I had a husband and friends and a house and a job and people who would notice if I disappeared off the face of the earth. I wasn’t that kid anymore.
But I still clung to the pillow because there was one truth I couldn’t push aside: I’d never spent a night by myself before.
Chapter 4
The first time I saw Rhys perform live, he was playing guitar and singing backup for a band he’d known for years and toured with twice. We’d been dating for about a month, and I could tell he wanted me there.
