Page 13 of Never Enough

Whatever he finds, it's enough.

He nods once. “Alright.”

“Alright?”

“Alright, you love her. I believe you. The rest of it—” He waves a hand vaguely at the concept of the rest of it. ”The rest of it I'll deal with later. But for now—you love her, you married her, that’s all I need to know at the moment.”

“She needs to move in,” I say.

“Into this house?”

“That's generally what ‘move in’ means.”

His eyes narrow. Not with anger. With the slow, dawning recognition of a man who has just realized the ground he's standing on is about to shift.

“You need me to move out,” he says.

I nod once. “I need you to move out.”

Silence.

The kind of silence that has its own weather system. The kind where you can hear the ice settling in the glasses and the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and the ceiling fan turning overhead in its slow, unhurried rotation.

Oliver picks up his beer. Takes a real drink this time. Not a sip. A drink.

“Alright,” he says again, but this time the word is heavier. Loaded with the seventeen follow-up clauses he's choosing not to voice. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“You could go home.”

The look he gives me could strip paint.

“To Mom and Dad’s,” he clarifies, as if I might have meant a different home. As if there’s a version of this conversation where go home means anything other than the thirty-five hundred square-foot farmhouse we grew up in.

“Mom is a way better cook than either of us,” I point out. She also harps about wearing work boots in the house. Has the pantry is organized by expiration date. And will ask you every morning whether you've eaten breakfast, and every evening whether you've met anyone nice. Only to follow up on every Sunday, as to whether you've considered that Gracie Howard has been right there this whole time.

“No,” Oliver says.

“It would be temporary.”

“It would be a hostage situation. A beautifully decorated, nutritionally balanced hostage situation.” He sets the bottle down. “Mom still has the chore chart on the refrigerator, Henry. The chore chart. Even Payton has outgrown a chore chart.”

He stands up and paces to the window. Looks out at the property—at the dark shape of the land rolling out toward the tree line, the porch light throwing a long yellow rectangle across the gravel drive. His reflection in the glass is sharp-jawed and pulsing.

“I know this isn’t your responsibility,” he says. “I was supposed to move out ages ago. Get my own place, but it’s comfortable here. We get along for the most part. I thought it was working.”

“It has been working. I just⁠—”

“Want to play house with your wife. I get it.”

“You could always go stay with Mims and Pops,” I suggest.

He turns around, frowning. “They’re still on a cruise right now.”

I nod. “Until the day before their big anniversary party.” He’s not saying no, so I continue. “They've got more room than they know what to do with since they downsized. That house in town—three bedrooms, two baths, a front porch with a swing. You'd have your own space. Your own entrance, practically. And they'd have someone close by.”

Oliver is quiet for a moment. Thinking. I can see him running the variables—proximity to his office, commute time, the relative social cost of living with his grandparents versus his parents, the inevitable commentary from the family, the question of how long temporary actually means in Blankenship terms.

“Mims will try to feed me,” he says.