“Once,” he says. “She couldn’t let go of her old life. They found her.”
Translation: Don’t text your ex. Or your cat. Or your trauma therapist.
“What happened to her?”
“Nothing good.”
I wait for more. He doesn’t offer it.
“Is that why you stay?” I ask quietly. “The first week. To make sure we don’t do something stupid?”
“Partly.” He glances at me. Those faded blue eyes, soft and serious. “Partly because the first week is when it hits hardest. And nobody should have to go through that alone.”
Nobody should have to go through that alone.Which is exactly what someone says right before they accidentally become the main character in your trauma rebound fantasy.
I think about my apartment. The one I’ll never see again. How many nights I sat in that kitchen by myself, stress-baking at 2 AM because loneliness has a texture and I was trying to cover it with butter and sugar.
I’ve been going through things alone my whole life.
I don’t know what to do with someone who thinks that’s wrong.
The miles blur together. One hour. Two. The landscape flattens into something that could be anywhere, every strip mall and gas station interchangeable with the last.
“I was married once,” Saul says, like he’s delivering plot development in a romance novel I’m trying very hard not to liveinside. “She said being married to me felt like living with a ghost. Like I was home, but part of me was always somewhere else.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just stare at him and think ghost dick and what if I volunteer as haunted.
“I’m not telling you this for sympathy,” he says, as if he didn’t just hand-deliver a backstory hotter than it should be. Brooding federal grief is not supposed to be this fuckable. “I’m telling you because I know what it’s like to lose a life. Not the same way you’re losing yours. But I know what it feels like to look around and realize nothing looks familiar anymore.”
His hands relax on the wheel. He glances at me again.
“So when I say the first few weeks are hell, I’m not just reciting a handbook. I’ve been somewhere adjacent to where you are. And I came out the other side.”
Something loosens in my chest. Not all the way. Just enough to breathe a little deeper.
“Did you?” I ask. “Come out the other side?”
“Mostly,” he says, like a man who still hasn’t learned how to use conditioner or emotional boundaries. “I still burn my coffee and forget to get haircuts. But I stopped feeling like a ghost in my own life. That took a while, though.”
I look at his hair. Too long, just like I noticed before.
“You really do need a haircut,” I say.
He laughs, and I add the sound to my ever-expanding file of Things That Make Me Wet For No Good Reason.
We finally arrive.
The apartment complex looks like every apartment complex I’ve ever seen.
Beige siding. Numbered buildings. A pool that probably hasn’t been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Parking spots with faded lines and one shopping cart that’s migrated from somewhere and made this its home.
Everything smells like someone’s last chance and cat piss in the summer.
Saul pulls into a spot near Building C. Cuts the engine.
“This is it,” he says.
I stare at the building. Three stories. Exterior stairs. A balcony with a dead plant someone left behind.
