“Ben made that for her last year during parents’ week.”
As if this couldn’t get worse. I sucked in the stupid tears. “Maybe we should keep it, then? Since he made it?” I offered. “I’m stuck,” she said suddenly as she grabbed another shirt. “Between wanting to burn everything that makes us remember them and wanting to hoard it all so we don’t forget.” At a loss for words, I just stood there.
She shrugged, then sat on the floor next to the box. “I have nothing that will help or make this better, all I have is…” Her voice caught. “All I have is me, which I know isn’t enough, but I have me, Rip. So if you need to let it go, if that’s what you need right now—” She met my gaze. “I’m here. I can be your mess. I can be the chaos you need.”
I dropped more clothes into the box and then sighed. “I used to believe in God, and then…” I grabbed another shirt and folded it. “It was too soon, Colby. And it wasn’t fair.”
“I know,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “Nothing about this has been fair.”
“No.” I looked away so she wouldn’t see the emotion on my face. “You think that they feel us? That they hear us?”
Damn it.
I’d been so horrible to her, and now I was asking her for comfort.
“Are you asking because you don’t believe in magic or fairy tales, or are you asking because you need to?” she asked gently, in that same voice that made me want to both pull her close and push her away.
The shirt dropped from my hands and fell in a flutter against the floor as I hung my head. “I think sometimes, even adults need a bit of a fairy tale.”
“Then.” She walked up next to me, so close I could smell her flowery perfume. She grabbed my hand firmly in hers, not gently, but in a way that said, I’m here, I’m always here. “I think that Brooks probably knows you’re in his closet stealing his clothes and being emotional. I think Monica is both crying and laughing over our antics with their kids. But most of all, I think that they’re looking at us, smiling and saying… Good job. Survival of the fittest.” She grinned. “Because that was them.”
“That was them,” I repeated with a small smile, wishing we could stay in this moment forever. I had no idea what it meant, but it was something, and something was better than whatever the hell I’d been trying to navigate for weeks.
I would take something with Colby over nothing any day.
And that’s when it hit me.
Colby.
She made me want to jump off the nearest roof while at the same time I was scared that if I got too close, I’d want her to stay with me, like this, forever.
What a fucking terrifying feeling that was.
“Yes,” I said again. “It was definitely them.”
And now it was just us.
Me and her.
Her and me.
Us.
She stared at a shirt with “Mama” in pink glitter across the front. “Do you think Viera would want to maybe keep this?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it and shook my head. It was all I was capable of doing as I took the shirt from her hands and put it into the box between us. Colby had said she would try to get most of Monica’s stuff out of there so I didn’t have to deal with it—which meant I needed to start on Brooks’s side of the closet. The mood was morose, heavy, as I started going through his suits.
They were expensive.
And in pristine condition.
I knew that he’d be happy that they would one day help someone maybe get a job or give someone confidence.
With each suit I pulled off the hanger, I would get a whiff of his cologne, and then I would get hammered with memory after memory.
College.
Our trip to Thailand.