Mum is taking her to the nature exhibition, and it sounds like Ethan has volunteered to go with her.
“Five minutes, and we’re leaving,” Mum says to Julia and slinks with me to the kitchen, where her coffee is now cold. She sips it like a lifeline anyway.
I check the fridge, but I’m not hungry. I just . . . “Mum?”
“Fin?”
I shut the door and lean against the myriad photos—Ethan, Tom, me, Mum, Julia—pinned there with magnets. They shift under my back as I fold my arms.
Mum cradles her mug and looks at me. She looks tired, but . . . happy. Content.
“How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
I whisper, “Move on from Dad?”
She doesn’t ask where the question is coming from, but sometimes I catch a spark in her eye like maybe . . . maybe she knows more than she lets on.
“He was the love of your life.”
Mum reflects quietly. She sets her mug down and moves to me. Her hug pulls me off the fridge and photos clink to the floor. Her perfume is so familiar. So comforting I immediately sag into her arms. She kisses my cheek and rubs it with her thumb. Her eyes are dark and full of compassion, understanding.
“Titiro whakamuri, ko¯kiri whakamua.” Look back and reflect and move ahead. “What I mean is let yourself love your past, remember it fondly, and let yourself love your future. Encourage it wholeheartedly.”
“That’s what you did?”
“I was happy then, and I’m happy now.”
“Doesn’t it ache sometimes?”
“If it didn’t, would it be love?”
I crush her tight. “Nga¯ mihi.”
There’s a shadow at the door. It’s Tom in shorts, polo shirt and cap. He has Julia lovingly by one hand, and his other arm is hooked around Ethan’s neck. He grins proudly and meets my eye. “You joining us, Finley?”
I shake my head. Not today. I can’t. “Gonna look at job listings.”
He inclines his head. “Sensible. I’ll look over your cover letters for you.”
I’m not looking directly at Ethan, but I glimpse his expression under his baseball cap.
Mum kisses me once more, ushers the others toward the front door, and Ethan’s face—that frown—winks out of sight.
I pick up a photo from the floor in front of the fridge. It’s Ethan and me, from the one week we shared together before I went to Europe.
I head to the porch, sit on the sunny front steps, and study it.
We’re sitting on the roof of my old car and we’re laughing. I can’t recall why we were up there. Can’t recall any of our conversations. Just a vague sense of warmth.
It’s painful, the inadequacy of memory. The fuzziness of it, when I need total recall—every minute detail.
A shadow lands over the picture and I look up. Cress has just come back from a jog; she’s deeply flushed, strands of her hair escaping from under her headband and clinging to her forehead. Her eyes are bright.
“What’cha up to?” She slings herself next to me on the step and I turn the photo over so she doesn’t see it.
“Just thinking.”
Just hoping the recent memories I’ve made with Ethan won’t fade into obscurity. That we’ll have those, at least.
She chats on and I murmur and nod. I have the vague sense she’s being nice, but doesn’t really love how much time Ethan and I spend together. She keeps asking if I’m looking forward to my boyfriend visiting.
Bennet, she means. I don’t know what Ethan has told her, but clearly there were some falsehoods. I pretend it’s true.
His falsehoods are mine too. I’ll protect them.
A sweat-cooled arm bumps mine. “You seem sad. Boy trouble?”
“Gonna miss him when he leaves,” I say wistfully. Distracted.
Her laughter pulls me into the moment. “He hasn’t even arrived yet. Who knows, maybe you and Bennet will figure out how to be closer to each other.”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll all work out in the end, you’ll see.”
Footsteps come from behind us and Ford seats himself on my other side, freshly showered, hair dripping onto his dark Ride Me, Baby t-shirt.
I wait for the crass one-liners and send a silent prayer skyward for it to be painless.
His arm comes around my shoulders first. “So you want to be a writer, huh? You know,” he side-eyes me, winking, “when it comes to strokes of the pen, I’m your man.”
I groan silently. It’s so ludicrous, it’s funny.
Let yourself love your future, encourage it wholeheartedly.
Being flirted with could be distracting. Perhaps there could be reprieve in it.
I look at Ford’s twinkling green eyes and laugh.
“Fin,” Ethan hisses the next morning from his weights in the corner of our living space. Metal clunks onto the floor and Ethan is crossing toward me. “Where are you going?”
He eyes my short shorts and sneakers quizzically.
“Ford wants to go for a morning run. Something about feeling the sunrise.”
“Ford?” Ethan blinks, confused.
“Yeah, currently living in a room under us?”