There are three things I never do. I never drink coffee after noon, I never leave a door unlocked. And I never look at the photograph on my nightstand.
I have built my life around those three rules the way other people build lives around family or faith or love. Carefully. Deliberately. With both hands.
Portland is grey outside my window, the way it almost always is. Rain from last night still drips off the fire escape. A woman on the street below is fighting her umbrella against the wind and losing, and then she just laughs and gives up and walks on soaking wet, like it is nothing.
I watch her until she disappears around the corner. Then I rinse my mug and turn away from the window.
My apartment does not look like a hiding place. That was intentional. The couch is grey, the walls are white, the one piece of art above the bookshelf is a botanical print of a plant I cannot name. I bought it because it reminded me of nothing. Everything in here was chosen. Nothing was kept from before. I check the front door lock before I go to the bathroom. I check it again after I brush my teeth.
My best friend Dani calls it obsessive. I call it efficient. We have had that argument so many times we now have it entirely in eyebrow movements.My phone buzzes on the counter.
Dani: still on for lunch? found a new ramen place. the broth allegedly has a COMPLEX EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
Me: that is not how food works
Dani: okay but are you coming
Me: yes
I set the phone down and straighten the dish towel on the oven handle. Then I straighten it again because the first time was slightly off. Then I stand back and look at my kitchen.Clean and quiet. This is what four years of work looks like. A routine so tight there is no room for anything unexpected. Wake at six. Run four miles. Shower. Coffee. Work. Lunch. Work. Home. Dinner. Book. Bed. I manage accounts for a logistics firm that moves cargo across three time zones and never once asks me to feel anything about it. I am good at my job. Iam good at this life. And most mornings, I almost believe that.
***
The ramen place is narrow and loud and smells exactly like what a complex emotional journey would smell like if it were made of pork bone and ginger. I tell Dani this and she looks vindicated for four full seconds before the food arrives. She is the only person in Portland who knows anything real about me. Not everything. But enough. She knows I left someone. She knows it was bad enough that I drove out of that city at four in the morning with two bags and did not stop until I crossed the state line. She has never pushed past that. That is why she is still here.
She is watching me now with the look she gets when she is deciding whether to say something.
I keep eating.
"You seem tense," she says.
"I seem normal." I replied
"You've straightened the chopstick wrapper three times, Elena."
I look down. I have. I put my hands in my lap.
"Work," I say.
"Elena." She says my name the way she does when she is not going to fight me but she is also not going to pretend she believes me. Flat. Patient. Waiting.
"I'm fine, Dani."
A long look. Then she nods once and goes back to her ramen. This is the mercy she gives me. The permission to keep the lie when I need it.
We talk about her terrible commute and a film that destroyed her in the best possible way. I laugh in the right places. I ask the right questions. By the time we leave she is smiling and I feel like myself again. Or at least like the version of myself I have learned to wear outside.
"Same time Thursday?" she asks at the door, pulling her coat closed.
"Thursday," I confirm.
She hugs me. I let her. I have gotten better at that.
She walks away and I stand on the pavement a moment longer than I need to, watching the street, watching people move through their ordinary lives like it costs them nothing.
I walk home instead of taking the bus.
***
It is 9:14 in the evening when my phone rings. Not a text. A call. I stare at the screen for two full seconds. No one calls me without warning except my mother. And my mother only calls without warning when something is wrong.
I answer.
"Elena."
Her voice is smaller than it used to be. I notice it immediately, the way you notice a familiar room with the furniture moved.
"Mom. What's wrong." Not a question. I already know it is not a question. The silence before she speaks lasts only three seconds, but those three seconds are thick with everything I have spent four years not thinking about. Voss City, that houseand of course him.
"It's my heart," she says. "They found something. The doctors want to operate within the week, Elena. I need you here."
I sit down on the edge of my grey couch. My hand finds the throw pillow beside me and I hold it without realising.
"Which hospital," I say.
"Mercy General. In Voss."
Of course. Of course it is Voss City. The one place I swore I would never go back to. The one thing in the world that could make me.
"Okay," I say. My voice is steady. I have always been good at steady.
"You don't have to come," my mother says, and she means it and she doesn't mean it, because we both know I am already deciding what to pack.
"I'll be there by Thursday," I tell her.
We stay on the line a little longer, speaking carefully the way people do when they love each other and are frightened. When we hang up I sit in the quiet for a long time.
Then I walk to my bedroom. I do not mean to look at the nightstand.But my eyes go there anyway, the way they always do when I am not guarded enough to stop them. To the photograph I keep face-down on the wood because right-side-up is something I cannot afford.I do not turn it over. I open my laptop and book a flight to Voss City instead. I do not let myself think about who I might see there. About what four years and a carefully rebuilt life means when you are heading back to the place that broke you open.
I do not let myself think about him. Atleast not yet.