“I debated whether or not I should tell you today, but in the end… I don’t know,” he says, his hands punched into his pockets. “I didn’t want you to find out some other way.”
“It’s okay,” I say, still searching for words and unable to find them. “That’s… that’s okay. I mean, that’sgood—for you, I guess. I’m glad you told me.”
“It is good,” he says. I can see his shoulders relax a bit, a long exhale, like the tension he had been holding there suddenly melted like wax. “Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s been good for me. It’s been giving me hope, Izzy. And I want that for you, too.”
My ears burn at the familiar sound,Izzy, my old nickname on his lips suddenly rancid and wrong. What used to be so tender, full of longing and love, now feels like a punishment: something swathed in pity, like a lukewarm smile tossed across the room when someone you used to love catches you hanging out without them.
“I’ll see you tonight?” he asks, pulling a hand from his pocket and resting it on my shoulder.
I nod, smile, and watch as he pets Roscoe and makes his way toward the door, the whole time trying to ignore the tingling on my skin in the exact place where he touched me. When he closes the door behind him, I feel a slow stretch in my insides: the hollowness, growing, like a gaping black hole.
Then I dip my hand beneath my shirt, finding my necklace, and clutch the ring—Ben’sring—that dangles from a chain fastened tightly around my throat.
CHAPTER SIX
My house reeks of Ben even after he’s left. His spiced aftershave and soapy hair gel; the sriracha turkey sandwich I know he ate in his car on the way over. I saw a dab of it on his shirt collar, a little red smear. A few years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at his clumsiness, licked my thumb and rubbed it against the stain. Maybe popped my finger into my mouth afterward, savoring the heat. A little tease before he left for work, ensuring that he would spend the day thinking of me.
Not anymore, though. Now, whenever I see him, I taste something metallic. Like sucking on pennies or licking a fresh wound, tasting blood on my tongue. It’s like my body is refusing to let me forget how deeply he hurt me. When he looks at me with those gentle eyes, soft and sweet like two dollops of whipped cream, I don’t melt the way I used to.
Instead, I harden.
“Losing a child is one of the most trying things a couple can go through,” Dr. Harris had said the first time I showed up to our appointment alone. I didn’t have to say anything; somehow, he just knew. Maybe he saw it coming. “Some make it out stronger, but most don’t make it out at all.”
I had wanted to fall into the category ofsome. Really, I did. Noteven to make it out stronger—just to make it out alive. But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on. Ben, always the realist, simply bowed his head and swam against the current. From day one, he leaned on statistics and facts, adjusting the probability of Mason’s return every single day until, finally, he decided it was time to stop swimming. We had lost the race, and it was time to admit defeat. It was time to rest. I knew it was painful for him. I knew it hurt. I knew it took everything in him to keep himself moving forward—and even more to force himself to stop—but I couldn’t even keep my head above water. From the very beginning, I was dragging him down, drowning him with me, and when he realized he couldn’t save us both, he decided to save himself.
Turns out, we were wedged firmly in withmost.
I find myself wondering now ifmostat least make it a year, because we certainly didn’t. We barely even made it six months.
We didn’t have the most traditional courtship, Ben and I, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that a relationship that started out with the speed and electricity of lightning disappeared just as fast—but still. We shared seven years together.Seven.
That’s something.
I can’t help but think back on it now, the moment we first met. It felt like fate, honestly; the collision, quite literally, of two people who were just meant to be together. At the time, it reminded me of the stars: how two can collide and fuse into one—bigger, brighter, stronger than before. But what I didn’t know then was that when they collide too fast, they don’t fuse at all. Instead, they explode, evaporating into nothing.
I had just moved to Savannah back then, three years out of college and my barely furnished studio apartment just blocks from my new office atThe Grit. I don’t even remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a writer forThe Grit; it was just something I had always known, the same way doctors and firefighters carry theirchildhood dreams over into adulthood, cupping them so tightly they forget to look up and notice what else could possibly be out there. What else exists.
Some of my best memories involve lying on the floor of my parents’ living room, Margaret and I, belly-side down on a rust-red oriental. Our skinny legs would kick in the air as Margaret flipped through the glossy pages, pointing at her favorite pictures.Tell me a story, she’d croon, and I would read the accompanying article out loud for her, sounding out every word. It was the kind of magazine people noticed in airports and grocery stores, with a thick matte cover and expensive-looking paper; the kind of magazine people kept as a coffee-table decoration—people like my parents—its mere existence so perfectly mirroring the type of image they aspired to uphold: sophisticated, cultured,well-to-do.
Their tagline, so impeccably succinct:The Grit Tells the Stories of the South.
I moved at the end of October, a week before my first day. I remember thinking that all these Southern cities are always a bit of the same, with their giant live oaks and Spanish moss and wrought-iron gates crawling with star jasmine—but at the same time, all a bit different, too. Unique in their own right. Savannah reminded me of home, but only the good parts, as if the squishy bruises had been extracted with a switchblade, leaving nothing but ripe possibility. And I was loving it, I really was, but five whole days of solitude—of not recognizing a single face, uttering a single word—can get a little lonely, so by that weekend, I had decided to get dressed up and venture out on my own.
I remember ambling up to a little spot by the Savannah River, my hands punched into my pockets and the smell of smoke and jalapeños making my nostrils flare. Then I walked up to the outdoor bar, my breath coming out in puffs.
“Fifteen dollars for all you can eat,” the bartender had said. Hesmelled like salt water and marsh mud and the sour traces of warm, spilt beer. “Comes with a shucker and towel.”
I fished out my wallet and handed him a twenty, exchanging the cash for a Blue Moon, a little knife, and a bucket full of oysters steamed over a grate of hot coals—but once I swung around, I immediately knocked into the man behind me, sending my beer flying.
“I am so sorry,” I said, trying to stop the rest of it from sloshing down my wrist. I looked at his jacket, at the frothy liquid dripping down his chest. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you—”
The man looked down at his jacket, soaking, and wiped the excess off with his gloves. Then he looked back at me, took in my face, and smiled, the corner of his lip pulling up gently until I got a glimpse of his teeth.
“It’s fine, no worries,” he said. “At least you didn’t hit me with that.” He pointed to the knife wedged between my fingers, the blade sticking straight out. “Shanked by an oyster shucker. Not a pleasant way to go.”
I looked down at the shucker, then back at him, horrified, feeling like a kid getting scolded for running with scissors.
“I’m kidding,” he said at last, his smile morphing into a playful grin. He must have noticed me blushing; my face turning a deep, dark red. “You know how to use that thing?”