“I drank a Pedialyte on the way over here, and my bladder’s bursting,” she says. “Plus I know basically nothing about you, so this was a good chance to find out if your house is full of surveillance equipment.”
I blink. “Surveillance equipment?”
“Landon and I have been taking bets on whether you’re in the FBI,” she provides helpfully.
I squint at her. “And you think I’m in the FBI because . . . ?”
“I don’t,” she says. “Landon does. My guess is witness protection.”
There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s being so reticent that your coworkers assume you’ve recently testified against a mob boss, and I never knew how thin the line between the two was.
In my defense, Landon is nineteen years old and nearly always listening to shoegaze in his AirPods at the decibel of a launching rocket, so it’s not like there have been loads of opportunities to bond.
“Bathroom’s this way,” I say, leading her inside.
She gawks as she follows, apparently unbothered by the lack of surveillance equipment.
We pause in front of the entrance to the hallway, where Miles’s room, the bathroom, and my room are tucked off of the living room. “Cute place,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say, though honestly, this is all pretty much Miles, a funky mix of thrift-store pieces from the fifties to seventies, Laurel Canyon chic.
She shuts herself in the bathroom—quite possibly, I think, to dig through my medicine cabinet—and I go back to the kitchen for another glass of water. In college, I really took the posters that littered our dorm rooms to heart: ONE TO ONE, IF AT ALL, they read, with an illustrated beer bottle beside an illustrated glass of water. The habit stuck.
From the kitchen I hear the bathroom door whine open, and I pad back into the living room, but Ashleigh isn’t there.
“Do you snowboard?” she calls from around the corner, down the hallway.
“What?” I pass through the doorway and see her not on the right, in my room, but to the left, in Miles’s. She’s wandering through it like it’s a museum, moving from the snowboard and battered hockey sticks in the corner to the plants and incense holders in the windowsill.
“This is my roommate’s room,” I tell her.
She’s reading the tiny text around the edge of a framed show poster, but I’m fixated on the framed photograph of Miles and Petra on his dresser. They stand in front of the lake, her arms slung around his waist, a less scruffy version of him looking down at her adoringly. She’s waifish and cute, and he’s rangy and winsome, and it’s impossible to hate this version of her, the one who made him so happy. Until it occurs to me that now she’s making Peter this happy.
I’d always thought he and I were so good together. He was stable and reliable and driven. He had a five-year plan, and not in a boring way. We were going to go see the cherry blossoms in Japan together, visit Dubai, see the Eiffel Tower. But we were also going to put money into retirement and have monthly dinners with his family.
In short, Peter was the exact opposite of my dad, who was occasionally a doting father but rarely a present one.
It had taken a lot of therapy for me to stop gravitating toward emotionally unavailable men, the kind who’d get a matching tattoo with you one week, and be dating your upstairs neighbor the next. I’d been so relieved when I finally fell in love with someone who actually wanted to love me back.
A Relationship Guy, who craved the bond his parents had. Who liked routine, and texted back in a reasonable amount of time and shared his calendar with me.
Maybe if we’d never moved back here, we’d still be together.
Then again, maybe in five years, he still would’ve left me for Petra. Maybe they’re every bit as destined as he’s convinced. I’m nauseated by the thought that maybe she belongs there, in that home I’d thought was mine, while I belong nowhere.
Ashleigh points to the two and one half pairs of Crocs (yes, that’s five individual Crocs) halfway in the closet. “Excuse me,” she says. “How many Crocs does this man have?”
“Well,” I say. “At least those and the ones I assume are on his feet at this very moment.”
She stares at the clogs. “Service industry, nurse, or run-of-the-mill weirdo?”
“Service industry,” I confirm; then, with a tickle of affection, “But also a weirdo. Which reminds me, we’re supposed to try the pinot tonight.”
“How did that remind you of pinot,” she says, but as I turn to leave, I forget she asked.
My stomach flips at the sight of the wall behind Miles’s headboard.
I’ve never noticed it before, because I’ve only been in here one other time.
Dozens of Polaroids are tacked in tidy columns. Tidier, I suspect, than Miles would have been. Likely they’re a holdover from his Petra era.
Which makes sense, given that they very clearly tell the story of their relationship. Three years’ worth of birthday cakes. Three years’ worth of tiny tinsel Christmas trees. Three years’ worth of stand-up paddle-boarding, cliff jumping, sipping wine in front of a sunset, riding a share moped in front of what I assume to be the Mediterranean Sea. Three years’ grinning into each other’s mouths with their hands in each other’s hair.
They look so happy.
It feels intrusive to see them like this, let alone to let my coworker gawk at the evidence of his failed relationship. “We should go,” I say, quickly steering Ashleigh back into the hallway and closing the door behind us.
Would he take her back? I find myself wondering, before seamlessly transitioning into Would I take Peter back?
“Definitely not,” I say aloud.
“What?” Ashleigh says.
“Nothing!” I say. “Let’s go get wine.”
Ashleigh follows me back to the front door, her head on a swivel. “Do you see ghosts or something?”
“Or something,” I say.
