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“Are you all right?” he asks when I sit on the sofa.
“Yes, thank you.”
He nods and falls silent. It’s not our usual, comfortable silence.
After several awkward seconds I ask, “What about you? Are you okay?”
He doesn’t answer for a bit. Then he says, “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“I’m as surprised as you are, but yes. We’re friends.”
“Would you like to hear an interesting feature of this old house?”
“Sure.” His tone is weird. Distant. Overly polite.
“The duct work is strange.” He gets up and walks toward the front door. “Sound carries all over the house.”
My stomach sinks. I know where this is going. “Henry, I—”
“I never noticed it because I’ve never invited anyone over before.” That’s a gut punch. “But it turns out that you can hear things happening far away in the house, for example, all the way down the hall. And it might be muffled, but there’s no mistaking it.” He opens the front door. “It’s good to know. I’ll have to look into correcting that before someone else embarrasses themself.”
I stand. His desire for me to leave is crystal clear. But I don’t want to leave, not this way. “Henry, I’m so sorry. I know it’s not funny, but—”
The “but” makes him flinch, and I wish I could take it back.
“Have a good night, Paige.”
It comes out sounding exactly like “Leave now.”
I want to explain, but I don’t know how to. And worse, even thinking about it causes the tickle of laughter to start again in my chest. I nod and slip past him out the front door.
When I turn to apologize one more time, the door closes, so quietly, so precisely, that it’s somehow worse than a slam.
I cross to my yard and go in through the back door. I know how to repair a lot of things thanks to my job at Handy’s, but not this.
How do you fix something you break that badly?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Henry
IwakeupSundayfeeling no better about that whole scene with Paige.
I know Paige tries to find the light side of everything, but that? I did not expect.
Her reaction is exactly why I don’t tell anyone. Let them think I’m a grinch or a Scrooge or just an ass in general. I’m used to it. I became a quiet kid after my grandmother passed, my anxieties taking over, but ultimately, that became a good thing. I became an observer instead of a participant, and that led me to my career.
People may think anthropology is boring and dusty, but I genuinely love it. I would study and learn all these things even if I didn’t get paid. So say what they might, I overcame that guilt to do something good because of it.
It hurt to have Paige sitting there, laughing. It’s humiliating to think I was trying to comfort her when the only tears she was crying were tears of laughter.
At me.
As my students would say, it sucked.
Midmorning, around the time she and Evie get back from church, there’s a soft knock at my door. I ignore it. And later, when I hear Paige and Evie at work on something else in their holiday hellscape, I don’t come out like I usually do to watch or even help. I move to the office where I won’t hear them.
It’s not until it’s dark and the irritating parade of headlights from Christmas light gawkers starts flashing through my windows every minute or so that I leave the house, heading out for a walk to clear my head. That’s when I find a package on my doorstep.
