Page 223 of What We Brave
My throat is tight. "Is that so wrong?"
"It's not wrong. It's smart, actually. Very practical. Very Laine." She pauses. "It's also a message."
"A message."
"To Blake. To Reid. To yourself." She uncrosses her arms. "Every month you pay that rent, you're sayingthis might not last.And maybe they don't know that consciously. But they feel it. Trust me."
"How would you?—"
"Because I did the same thing."
I look up.
She picks up her wine glass. Turns it by the stem. She's not looking at me now — she's looking at the countertop, at some middle distance where the memory lives.
"When Kerry and I moved in together, I kept my storage unit. Had furniture in it, some boxes, stuff I didn't need but couldn't let go of. I told myself it was practical. We'd just moved in. What if it didn't work? What if I needed my own space again? Better to keep it. Just in case."
"That's reasonable."
"That's what I told myself. For four months." She takes a sip. "And then Kerry found the receipt. On the counter, with the mail. And she got very quiet and she looked at me and she said, 'Do you think we're going to fail?'"
The apartment is so quiet I can hear the fridge humming.
"And I said no, of course not, it's just practical, it's just in case. And she said, 'In case of what?' And I didn't have an answer. Because theanswer was — in case she wasn't enough. In case I wasn't brave enough. In case the world was right about us and we were wrong."
"Jamila."
"I canceled it the next day." She meets my eyes. "Not because she asked me to. She didn't. She would never. But because I realized I was keeping one foot out the door and calling itindependencewhen it was actually just fear."
"It's not the same?—"
"No. It's not the same. Your situation is different, your risks are different, all of it's different." She sets her glass down. "But the math is the same. The people you love can feel your exit strategy, Laine. Even when you don't mean them to."
I think about Blake in the yard."Plant whatever you want."The way his voice stayed steady while his eyes didn't. The way he said"Take your time"when what he meant wasplease stay.
I think about Reid, shredding his water bottle label into confetti, floating the idea like a joke because making it a joke meant nobody had to be vulnerable if it didn't land.
They feel it. Of course they feel it.
"If I move in — officially, no safety net, no apartment to come back to — it's real. In a way I can't undo."
"Isn't it already real?"
"It's real for us. But the rest of the world..." I pull at a thread on my sleeve. I can't look at her for this part. "My parents know about Reid. They don't know about Blake."
Jamila's quiet for a beat. "At all?"
"They know he exists. They think he's Reid's friend. Our friend. Back when things were really bad I told Mom a little about how Blake was treating me." If I don't leave this thread alone I'm going to unravel my whole darn shirt. "They don't know what he is to me now. They don't know there's anus."
"Are you going to tell them?"
"I'm supposed to. We're going to visit them this summer. Guatemala. And I keep telling myself I'll do it before then, but every time I pick up the phone?—"
"You can't."
"I can't." My voice is barely a whisper. "Because as long as I haven't said it, as long as I haven't moved in, as long as I still have this apartment and a life that fits into a shape they'd recognize — I'm still their daughter. I'm still the Laine they raised. And the second I say it out loud?—"
I stop. Because the end of that sentence is a door I'm not ready to open.
