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“No,” I said. “Keep it. You’d use it more than me, anyway.”
There were still a couple stickers on the back of it—one from the Amnesty International club I’d joined in high school, the other for a band I was embarrassed to admit I’d barely listened to but thought their logo was cool. I didn’t know if those made the guitar worthless, but it should stillplay, regardless.
But Sam didn’t reach for the instrument. “I don’t want it,” he said. “No offense, Phoebe, but I don’t want...”
He trailed off without finishing that sentence, which was cruel, considering he’d started it with two of the most dreaded words in the English language.No offense. He didn’t want what? To have anything of mine in his house? To remember me? To care about me anymore?
“It would be painful,” he said finally. “To see that every day.”
Which made total sense. But for some reason, it was suddenly more important to me than ever that I give himsomethingand that he take it, that there was some external acknowledgment of all that had passed between us.
“So use it for parts,” I said. “Smash it up. That always looks really satisfying—when rock stars smash their guitars onstage. You can’t get that kind of catharsis from throwing a tambourine, that’s for sure.”
He didn’t smile.
“Please, Sam,” I said. “Seriously, I won’t use it. Take the pickups out of it or whatever you were talking about doing and then throw the rest of it away. Or put new strings on it and give it to one of your students who shows an interest. I don’t care. But please, take it.”
He grasped the guitar by the neck, hefting it in his hand. Then he set it gently back down on the floor, leaning it against the wall where it had been previously. My eyes felt hot and itchy as he stepped forward to envelop me in a hug.
His arms were warm and tight around me, his hands pressed in between my shoulder blades. I’d known he’d give great hugs, since that night of his party. I’d craved his touch, even then, wanted to feel his arms around me just like this. A sob caught in my throat, and I squeezed him back, resting my cheek against his shoulder.
I don’t regret any of it, either,I wanted to say.Except the very end. If I could go back in time and undo that last day, I would.
“Drive safe,” he said. Then he gave me one final squeeze, pressed a kiss to my hair, and was gone, the guitar left behind exactly where he’d put it.
Lenore finally crept out from under the bed, just in time to see me sniffle a huge bubble of snot from my nose.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not a pretty crier. I’m disgusting. Shall we go be disgusting together, seven hundred miles from here?”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE SEMESTER STARTEDback up at the end of August, and it was a relief to get back into my old routine. Preparing syllabi for the last two classes I’d teach in my graduate career, finalizing my dissertation chapters for Dr.Nilsson’s comments, filling out paperwork to stay on track for graduation in December. Everything was back to normal.
Except it wasn’t. Now I had a cat, who seemed to only moderately like me more than she had in Florida, but who at least seemed to love the small screened-in balcony that came with her new home. And now I was having trouble sleeping, unable to fight off the melancholy if I had even a minute of unfilled time on my hands. I had a giant hole in my chest in the place where my heart should be, and nothing I tried seemed to fill it up—not reading, not writing, not grading papers, not mindless Netflix watching.
Conner and I talked on the phone at least once a week, andhe’d put Shani on for her medical expertise if I happened to mention anything about my sudden insomnia. Her advice was sound and in keeping with what the internet said—no caffeine after two, no screens after eight, no using my bed for anything but sleep. But instead I sat up in my bed all night, drinking coffee and reading unsolved mysteries Reddit threads on my phone.
We’d had a few people look at our dad’s house, including Josue, who ended up saying it seemed like more work than he wanted to take on.
“It was the black bedroom,” I said on the phone to Conner, leaning down to peer into my almost-empty fridge. “I told you we should’ve painted it.”
“Actually...” I could hear rustling on the other end, like Conner was shifting around. No matter how many times I told him the mic on his earbuds was super sensitive, he insisted on doing things like refilling his cup with ice or playing a video game with full sound on while we talked. Once, I’d heard him taking a leak. I’d told him in no uncertain terms that he was ideally never to do that again while we were on the phone or, if he absolutely couldn’t hold it, at least mute his phone like a normal respectful person.
“Shani and I were thinking maybe we could move in,” Conner said. “We’d take over the payments, of course, and do what we need to in order to make everything right with creditors or your share or whatever. It’d be cheaper than our rent on an apartment now. And there’d be no need to repaint the room, because it’s kinda perfect for a gaming space with all that darkness.”
“You’re going to turn my childhood bedroom into agaming space?”
“At least I didn’t sayman cave,” Conner said. “What do you think?”
Everything he said made sense. At the start of the summer, I’d assumed that Conner felt the same way about the house that I had—that it was filled with bad memories and not a place he’d ever care to return. But staying there even for a few months had shown me that it was just four walls and a roof and a few doors that were so swollen from humidity they didn’t shut all the way anymore. If it could help him and Shani on their new life together, then I was happy for them to live there.
Except one thing. “Oh god,” I said. “You’re going to be neighbors with Sam.”
“Yeah...” Conner said. “Awkward. I take it you haven’t talked since you left?”
There had been one night, when I’d been feeling really low and I’d reached for my phone and I would’vedefinitelysent Sam a text, ranging from anything as innocuous as aheyto as thirsty as a cute selfie I’d “accidentally” forward. Not that I would stoop to such tactics.
If I had his phone number. I realized that we’d never actually exchanged that information—we hadn’t needed to. He was always right there, one knock away.
