Page 179 of What We Brave
That's fine. Laine thinks before she responds. She always has. She's deliberate. Careful. She doesn't fire off texts — she considers them. That's one of the things I lo?—
My phone buzzes.
I grab it so fast I almost knock it off the table.
Laine
On my way home.
Home.
She said home.
I read it again. Three times. Four.
Home. Not "back." Not "there." Home.
"Reid." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. "She's coming."
He appears in the kitchen doorway, dish towel in hand.
"Told you she wasn't running," he says.
"She said home."
Reid tilts his head. "What?"
"Her text. She said 'on my way home.' Not back. Home."
He stares at me. Then a grin spreads across his face — slow, warm, the kind that reminds me why I've spent the last seven years making sure he was okay.
"Yeah," he says. "She did."
I sit back down on the couch. Surrounded by folded laundry and orphan socks. My heart hammering like I'm twenty years old and don't know shit about anything.
She's coming home.
But I'm still wound tight. Still braced. Because I've learned the hard way that good things announce themselves and then don't show up. That words are easy and follow-through is where everything falls apart.
So I wait. Listening for her car. Trying not to hold my breath.
There. Tires on gravel. Engine cutting off. A car door.
Keys.
Front door opens and she walks in. First thing I clock is the red around her eyes. She's been crying. Not recently — before. The kind of red that hangs on after you've scrubbed your face and told yourself you're fine.
"Hey," she says. Voice sounds different. Not wrong. Lighter. Like whatever was sitting on her when she left this morning got parceled out somewhere between here and the diner.
"Hey yourself." Reid materializes in the kitchen doorway, dish towel slung over his shoulder. Easy. Relaxed. Like we weren't both climbing the walls for two hours. He's always been better at that. The acting-normal thing. I never learned the trick.
Laine kicks off her shoes. Drops her purse by the door. Just stands there a second, scanning the living room like she's getting her bearings. Like she walked out of one version of this place and came back to find it exactly the same and doesn't know what to do with that.
Her eyes find the laundry piles. Then me, sitting in the middle of them.
"You did laundry," she says.
"It's Sunday."
