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Miss Last Night huffed irritably and crossed her arms over her chest.
“So I’m supposed to believe that you just fuck around on your wife?” she asked, jutting her chin up at me.
I grinned darkly.
“We didn’t fuck.”
Miss Last Night glared at me.
“You just bring girls over and get them naked with the promise of fucking around on your wife?”
“My wife and I have a rather complicated relationship.” I extended my palm toward the door. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind,” I said.
Instead of leaving, Miss Last Night ran her fingertips down my arm. “But she’s not here right now, is she?”
I lost it. I screamed at Miss Last Night to get out. I stalked down the hallway after her, quick at her fleeing heels. I bellowed down the stairs as Aurnia, Conor and Rian’s concerned faces appeared at the bottom.
“My wife is coming back,” I shouted as Miss Last Night tripped down the last few stairs. “She’s coming back and you need to get the fuck out! Because she’s coming back! My wife is fucking coming back!”
Conor climbed the stairs toward me, but I turned before he could speak. I left the chaos on the stairs. Left Miss Last Night to cry. Left my friends to worry. Left the image of that doorway and the woman who walked through it, only to walk right back out of it behind me.
My footsteps rattled the ceiling downstairs as I stormed past my old room. I heard something crash to the floor in the parlour when I slammed the door of the bedroom at the end of the hallway.
I wanted everything back in the closet. Everything hidden. Everything out of sight. I threw the cashmere sweater, that smelled like the perfume I wished I could forget, into the mess of tangled hangers. I shoved empty boxes into the back, their cardboard cracking, bending, collapsing. Old pairs of shoes I hurled against the hanging sweaters and bulky fur coats. When they fell, I kicked them wildly, jammed them in violently with my heel.
I reached down for another box, my wild fingers knocking off the lid. I grabbed instead a fistful of envelopes. They cracked in my grip like logs on a fire. Their yellowed paper was brittle, not cutting. They might just turn to ash, should I squeeze just a little harder.
There was no shoving these into the closet this time. No scooping back into the box like spilled trash. No hiding the name written in an uncertain, trembling hand across the front:
Mason.
The ink was already against my skin. The lips that had sealed the edges were as close as they would ever be to mine as I brought an envelope to my lips. I breathed in the scent of that old paper, that old ink, shakily.
I’d run from the secrets inside my nan’s old shoebox for too long. I sank to the edge of the bed, letter light in my fingers. I’d run away from a lot of things. I’d been running from Rachel for a decade and she hadn’t even been within my reach. And when she had, well, I’d just run all the faster.
Opening the first letter felt like I’d stopped running for the first time in a long time. My muscles felt weak, my body exhausted. There was a weariness in my bones, a soreness in my heart.
Opening the first letter felt like the first real step forward I’d ever taken.
