And I understood, standing in the doorway with my coat half off, that the empty chair was because of me. He knew I’d be there. Sunday was standing for me too, and he knew it, and that was the thing that had kept him home. I’d come to reach him and he’d made himself unreachable, and we’d managed it again, the two of us, from opposite ends of the same town — each of us arranging not to be caught wanting the other one.
Dinner was warm and ordinary and I sat through it with the apology still loaded and nowhere to put it. Zion and Taryn. Tre. Raschad at the stove, Simone correcting him. Micah and Zhaire inhaling everything in reach. They folded me in the way they always did, no questions, a plate in my hands before my coat was off — and the whole meal I wanted to lean over to Zion and ask how his brother was. If he was eating. Sleeping. Whether he’d gone back to the rigid beautiful terrible routine or whether he was worse than that. I sat there with the question in my mouth all night and never let it out, because I’d given up the right to it. You don’t break a thing and then ask the people who love it how it’s mending.
I got up to help with the dishes because sitting still had gone unbearable, and Simone followed me into the kitchen, and once the water was running I said it before she could say anything, because I’d been holding it all through dinner.
“I shouldn’t keep coming,” I said. “If the reason he’s not here is me, then I shouldn’t — I don’t have to keep coming, Simone. I don’t want to be the reason he can’t come to his own family’s table.”
“Stop.” She set down the dish towel. “We want you here. You hear me? Every one of us. You don’t get to give that up because my brother’s being a stubborn ass.”
“I manipulated him.”
“You pushed him. His ego is bruised, and because you saw all the way through him and it scared him to death, Julian would rather miss hisown nephew’s whole childhood than sit at a table across from the person who got that good a look at him. That’s not on you. That’s the oldest thing about him.” She picked the towel back up. “He’ll get over it. Trust me. None of us are upset with you. I have not seen my brother as happy as he’s been these last months since before our mother died, and every one of us knows exactly who to thank for it, even him, especially him, which is half of why he can’t look at you right now.”
I had to look at the sink.
“He still asks,” she said, gentler. “Raschad’d kill me for telling you. Julian called him last week to take your car in — the service light, the rotation, whatever it was — because he knew you wouldn’t make time with the trial coming. Three weeks of not speaking to you, and he’s still finding ways to keep your life running where you can’t catch him doing it.” She let it sit. “That’s not a man who stopped. That’s a man who doesn’t know what to do with how much he hasn’t.”
The kids came thundering back down the hall and the moment closed, and I stood at the sink with my hands in the warm water and her towel folded on the counter where she’d set it.
I drove home with one more thing to carry, and it was heavier than the despair had been, because despair you can set your weight against and hope you just have to hold. He was still out there keeping every promise he’d ever made to the people I loved, from a distance, in the dark, with his own hands. He could do all of that for three weeks running without a word to me.
He just couldn’t do the one thing that would have cost him something, which was come back across the distance and let me see him need me. And I’d already tried the only way I knew to make a man do that, and the trying was what had put us here.
So I went home and then I lay down on my own side of a made bed and didn’t look at my phone, all night, with the whole discipline of a woman looking at nothing else.
This wasn’t heartbreak over a casual relationship ending. This was grief. Real, devastating grief over losing the man I was supposed to spend my life with. Because that’s what Julian had been, even if we’d never said it out loud.
45/
love did that
julian
The first week without Alyssa,I went back to the routine like a man climbing back into armor that no longer fit. Up at five. Ten miles. Shower, coffee, the desk by seven. Every part in its place. And my body moved through all of it like it was wading through wet concrete.
I dreamed about my mother almost every night. Not the old ones, where she sat in the chair by the window with her eyes shut and her hand keeping time. New ones. Ones where she asked me why I never came to see her. Why I’d stopped singing and playing. I’d wake at three with my chest tight and the sheets damp, drowning in something I couldn’t name and wouldn’t have known how to set down if I could.
I thought about calling Alyssa countless times that first week. I’d get as far as her name on the screen and stop. I missed her, but I was still angry. Underneath the anger was a thing I liked even less: I did not want her to see me like this. Unshaven, not sleeping. She'd decided I was a man who needed handling. I wasn't about to call her up and prove it. Let her hear in my voice that she'd been right, that she'd reached into me and pulled something loose that wouldn't go back. So I put the phone down. Not yet. Not like this.
By the fourth day I’d sent three of Zion’s calls to voicemail. So he came by my house, after finding out from Glory I’d been working from home for a few days. He didn’t even give me time to decide whether to answer the door. He knocked once, then used his key and walked right in, shut the door behind him, and dropped into the chair across from my desk in my home office.
“We don’t ignore each other, Jules.”
“I wasn’t ignoring you. I’ve been busy.”
“Stop fronting. What the hell happened with you and Alyssa?”
“We’re taking a break.”
“Why?”
I could have deflected, but was too tired to hold the wall up, and some part of me wanted him to understand why I felt the way I did.
“She played me. Manipulated me into a grief group. Lied to my face about needing support when what she wanted was to get me into therapy.” I explained what happened and waited for the outrage on my behalf. What I got was my little brother grinning.
“Good for her.”
I stared at him. “What?”