Page 20 of Left of Forever

I laugh all the way to my car and down her driveway as I pull away. It takes about a block for the loneliness to crash over me again.

I’d gone to my mom’s hoping I’d be inspired. Empowered, maybe? That I’d be reminded that being alone is different from being lonely. I’ve always wished for more of her independence, but maybe that’s impossible when you find your other half before you’ve got a fully developed frontal lobe.

Instead, even she has aman friend, now, on top of all her own things.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my piece of the bakery she began herself, and all my friends are my ex-husband’s family. My hobbies include riding the horse that I still share with him and avoiding thinking about him.

And I can’t even keep a pen pal.

CHAPTER 9

WREN

My whole life, my mom has always preferred doing Thanksgiving with friends. It was her parents’ favorite holiday, she’d always told me, and it is the one holiday that made her wish she had someone. One of the rare instances when loneliness would catch up to her. Not Valentine’s or Christmas or New Year’s. Thanksgiving. She’d say the day felt like a choreographed dance between properly timing all the dishes, spinning through all the sounds of the day, dipping in and out of all the smells and flavors. She claimed that hosting without a partner felt like too much work, and showing up somewhere where everyone belongs to someone else that day felt too sad. Even after I got married, rather than come along with me to the Byrds’, she always went over to Martha O’Doyle’s and did something more casual. Usually bunco and a potluck of desserts. I’ve never judged her for it, but this might be the first year that I truly understand it. Ironic that, also this year, I know she’s brought her man friend along to her traditional celebration.

At Sage’s house, I float from room to room alongside the smells of roasting turkey and can’t shake feeling like an outsider. Indy and Sam are sitting on Sage’s couch, huddled together over Indy’s phone while she shows him the photo shoot she staged with Gary (a goose) in a hollowed-out pumpkin and a variety of other autumn vignettes. The cat and dog are sharing Sable’s plaid bed on the ground. Silas is sprawled out on an overstuffed yellow chair that’s been moved into the living room so a dining table could be arranged in the sunroom, and football plays quietly on the television. Silas is also preoccupied with his phone, but when he sees me hovering in the kitchen, he gestures for me to come closer.

“If you had to make an educated guess,” he asks me, “does this girl look like she’s into mutilated monster romance or, like, hot for the Phantom of the Opera?” He shoves his phone in my face with a dating app open on a pretty girl.

“I don’t know. Why?” And then I realize. “You are notmutilated, Silas Byrd,” I say sternly. He’s trying to joke away what happened to him, but I see the flash of real vulnerability there. When he registers my unsmiling expression in the face of his phony-smarmy one, he drops the act.

“I know I’m not.” He sighs, deep and bone-weary and uncharacteristically old. “Feels like if I talk about it in the least sensitive way, maybe I’ll get less sensitive about it. Just think I need to get out and get laid and, like, rip the bandage off. For lack of a better expression,” he says. He’s always so achingly open when he feels safe to be.

“Silas, you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable at all,” I reply. When this makes him get twitchy, I decide to throw him a bone. “And honestly, Si, you’re not gonna have any trouble. People love a scarred hero. You didn’t hear this from me,but you could probably use it to your advantage.” His eyes light up instantaneously. “With great power comes great responsibility, though, dammit. Use it wisely. Be honest.”Please don’t lie and tell women you got those scars saving a litter of puppies or kittens. Have more faith in yourself than that. Have more faith in whoever it is you choose, too.

Sage and Fisher drift in from upstairs, patting down hair and adjusting clothes before they perform some terrible charade about how they’d been “looking for something together,” which everyone dutifully ignores. Their love cloud is so thick it’s a miracle they can see anyone else through it.

A timer goes off in the kitchen, and I make my way toward it, just as Ellis bursts in through the sunroom door. He scrapes his boots on the mat and peels off his mist-covered jacket, the scents of petrichor and firewood wafting over and mingling with all the smells of the meal. The sight of him brings the usual pang, but when he looks my way and his mouth hooks into a half-formed smile, I find myself smiling back, reflexively. He stares at me and I at him, and whatever shredded and frayed thread is still between us pulls unbearably tight.You all belong to each other, with or without me, I think.But I want someone to belong to me again, too. I wish it were still you. I hate that I wish it were still you.

Just as I think he’s about to say something, his phone rings from the pocket of his jacket, hanging on a hook that looks like a mushroom growing out of the wall. He scoops it free and steps into the kitchen.

“It’s Micah on FaceTime,” he says before he answers.

I remember the pie from the oven and spin to retrieve it while Micah’s floating head is passed around the room.

“Let me see the desserts,” I hear Micah say. “I just gotta lay my eyes on them for a minute.”

Sam walks the phone to me, and I smile at Micah’s face, sittingwith his back up against a headboard in what looks like a cheap hotel room, a carton of Chinese takeout balanced precariously on his chest.

“Walk me through them, Wren. Give it to me good and dirty.” He licks his lips.

“You sure? You’re only torturing yourself, man,” I say with a laugh.

“Yeah, just let me see,” he replies.

“All right, well. I made chocolate bourbon pecan,” I say with a wince.

“Fuuuucccckkkkkkk,” he growls ferociously.

“Sorry, bud. I also did a pear frangipane tart. You know I had to bust out the big guns with the fancy chef here this year,” I say.

He makes a sobbing sound, and I turn the camera around to show him. When I bring it back to face me, he’s nothing but a flesh-colored blur, his phone pressed into his forehead.

“I gotta go cry in private now,” says his muffled voice.

“Okay, bud. We miss you.”

He hangs up without a goodbye.