Reminders of Him

“I never leave the house without it.”

She laughs and then grabs her purse and pets Ivy goodbye.

When we get downstairs, Kenna and I fold up the table and chairs and begin hauling them to my truck. It works out that I’m here today, because I’ve been meaning to move one of these tables to the new house.

I’m carrying the last armful of chairs to the truck when Lady Diana appears out of nowhere. She stands between me and Kenna and the truck. “Are you leaving with the jerk?” she asks Kenna.

“You can stop calling him a jerk now. His name is Ledger.”

Lady Diana looks me up and down and then mutters, “Ledgerk.”

Kenna ignores the insult and says, “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

I’m laughing when we get in the truck. “Ledgerk. That was actually really clever.”

Kenna buckles her seat belt and says, “She’s witty and vicious. It’s a dangerous combination.”

I put the truck in reverse, wondering if I should give her the other gift I have for her. Now that we’re here in my truck together, it feels slightly more embarrassing than when I got the idea for it, and the fact that I spent so long on it this morning makes it that much more awkward, so we’re at least a mile from her apartment before I finally work up the nerve to say, “I made you something.”

I wait until we’re at a stop sign, and then I text her the link. Her phone pings, so she opens the link and stares at her screen for a few seconds. “What is this? A playlist?”

“Yeah. I made it this morning. It’s over twenty songs that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that could remind you of anything sad.”

She stares at the screen on her phone as she scrolls through the songs. I’m waiting for some kind of reaction from her, but her face is blank. She looks out the window and covers her mouth like she’s stifling a laugh. I keep stealing glances at her, but I eventually can’t take it anymore. “Are you laughing? Was that stupid?”

When she turns to face me, she’s smiling, and there might even be burgeoning tears in her eyes. “It’s not stupid at all.”

She reaches across the seat for my hand, and then she looks back out her window. For at least two miles, I’m fighting back a smile.

But then somewhere around the third mile, I’m fighting back a frown because something as simple as a playlist shouldn’t make her want to cry.

Her loneliness is starting to hurt me. I want to see her happy. I want to be able to say all the right things when I tell Patrick and Grace why they should give her a chance, but the fact that I still don’t truly know her history with Scotty is one of the many things I’m afraid might prevent the outcome we both want.

Every time I’m with her, the questions are always on the tip of my tongue. “What happened? Why did you leave him?” But it’s either never the right moment, or the moment is right but the emotions are already too heavy. I wanted to ask her last night when I was asking her all the other questions, but I just couldn’t get it out. Sometimes she looks too sad for me to expect her to talk about things that will make her even sadder.

I need to know, though. I feel like I can’t fully defend her or blindly root for her to be in Diem’s life until I know exactly what happened that night and why.

“Kenna?” We glance at each other at the same time. “I want to know what happened that night.”

The air develops a weight to it, and it feels harder to breathe in.

I think I just made it harder for her to breathe too. She inhales a slow breath and releases my hand. She flexes her fingers and grips her thighs.

“You said you wrote about it. Will you read it to me?”

Her expression is filled with what looks like fear now, like she’s too scared to go back to that night. Or too scared to take me there with her. I don’t blame her, and I feel bad asking her to, but I want to know.

I need to know.

If I’m going to drop to my knees in front of Patrick and Grace when I beg them to give her a chance, I need to fully know the person I’m fighting for. Even though at this point she couldn’t say anything that would change my mind about her. I know she’s a good person. A good person who had one bad night. It happens to the best of us. The worst of us. All of us. Some of us are just luckier than others, and our bad moments have fewer casualties.