At turns hilarious and gut-wrenching, this is a tremendously fun slow burn

One…
Two…
“I’m sorry, too. I want this,” he whispers. “I want you.”
Three…
I want you, too, I think. But I don’t even know how to tell you that Emma is the least of it. Another
woman giving you head is the least of it.
“Talk to me, Mace,” he urges. “Please.”
Four…
Five…
“I want you,” he repeats, and his voice carries a strange distance. “But I’m realizing now that maybe I
shouldn’t.”
Six…
Seven…
By the time I reach ten, my hands are no longer shaking when I lower them. But because I didn’t expect
Elliot to leave, I never heard him walk away.
In the dark night, the reception on the outdoor porch is a beacon of tiny lights and stars thrown from
candlelight traveling through glasses of champagne. Heat lamps placed at regular intervals are warm
enough in the night chill to make the humid air warp around the slow-dancing couples.
I find George to the left of the dance floor, near the wedding cake, which has already been cut and
shared. His cheeks are red, smile wide, eyes watery with happy inebriation.
“Mace!” he yells, pulling me into a lumbering hug. “Where’s my brother?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
He reaches up, pulling a small twig from my hair and good God it only occurs to me now that I have no
idea what I look like coming out of the gardens after fucking Elliot.
George grins. “I suspect you have a better idea than I do.”
Liz comes up beside him, grinning at her tipsy husband. “Macy! Whoa, you look…” Understanding comes
into her eyes and she barks out a laugh. “Where’s Elliot?”
“The question of the hour,” George murmurs.
“I’m right here.”
We turn, finding him standing just to the side, holding a half-finished glass of champagne. The warm
flush I felt on his cheek, against my lips, is gone. In its place is a pale stare, a slash of a frown. His tie is
missing, shirt unbuttoned at the collar and smudged with both dirt and lipstick. Looking at him now, it is
doubly obvious what we’ve been doing.
I smile at him, trying to communicate with my eyes that there’s more to discuss here, but he’s not
looking at me anymore. Tilting the flute to his lips, he downs the rest, places it on the tray of a passing
waiter, and then says, “Macy, did you need me to drop you off at your motel?”
Shock causes a cold wave to pass through me. George and Liz go quiet and then shuffle away under a
haze of secondhand mortification. My heart takes off, a snare drum leading into a cymbal crash as I realize

---

I’m being asked to leave.
“It’s fine,” I tell him, “I can grab a Lyft.”
He nods. “Cool.”
I take a step forward, reaching for him, and he stares at my hand on his arm with a frown, as if it’s caked
in mud.
“Can we talk tomorrow?” I ask.
His face twists, and he picks up another glass of champagne, downing this one in the time it takes for
the waiter to offer me one, and for me to decline. Elliot grabs another before the anxious waiter ducks
away.
“Sure we can talk tomorrow,” he says, waving the glass. “We can talk about the weather. Maybe our
favorite type of pie? Or – oh – we haven’t yet talked about the merits of a Crock-Pot versus a pressure
cooker. We could do that?”
“I mean finish what we’ve started,” I whisper, realizing we’ve drawn the attention of a few family
members. “We weren’t finished.”
Alex watches us at a distance with wide, worried eyes.
“Weren’t we? I thought we had the grand finale. You did what you’re best at,” he says, smiling grimly.
“You shut down.”
“You walked away,” I retort.
He laughs harshly, shaking his head and echoing in a murmur, “I walked away.”
Softening, I say, “Tomorrow… I’ll come by.”
Elliot lifts the glass, swallowing four gulps and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure thing,
Macy.”
At one in the morning, the sky feels haunted in its darkness. I climb the porch to my old summer home,
skipping over the predictably broken step. Using the long-ignored key on my ring, I let myself inside, where
it’s even colder than it is in the woods; the insulation keeps the chill stored within the dark plaster walls. I
turn on lights as I go, and kneel to set a small fire in the wood-burning stove.
Obviously, if I’ve been here only once in the past ten years, I should remember the exact dates, but I
don’t. I only know it was a week, maybe two, before I left for my sophomore year at Tufts, and we drove up
at night to sift through our possessions and move all the cherished things into closets we could lock, to keep
curious vacation renters from taking anything. The memory of that night feels like a blur of watery color
streaking through fog.
Upstairs, I sift through the other keys on my ring, finding the smaller one, and slide it into the lock on
Dad’s closet door. It enters in jagged steps, sticking halfway through, requiring a tiny wiggle before it clicks
and turns with a rusty protest.
His closet opens with a whiff of musty air, and my stomach drops when the scent and realization merge:
I’ll need to throw most of this out. He kept some shirts and pants up here. Hiking boots, a fly-fishing vest.
There are photo albums on the shelf up top, a nativity diorama I made in fourth grade. Letters from Mom.
And, at the back, the stack of questionable magazines.
My butt lands on the floor before I realize I’ve been sliding down the door frame. Beneath the smell of
mildew, there is the unmistakable smell of him: the Danish cigarettes, his aftershave, the bright linen scent
of laundry. I pull a shirt from a hanger – messily; the wire flies up off the rod and hits the door on the way
down. Pressing the flannel to my face, I inhale, choking through a sob.
I haven’t felt this way in so long. Or maybe I never felt this particular emotion: I want to cry. I want to
positively sob. I give it full access, letting it tear through me into these awful howls that echo off the high
ceilings and shake my torso, curling me forward. Snot, spit: I am a mess. I feel him right there behind me
but I know he isn’t. I want to call out to him, to ask him what’s for breakfast. I want to hear the even
cadence of his footsteps, the intermittent snap of the newspaper as he reads. All these instincts seem to live
so close to the surface that they warp and weave through the fabric of possibility. Maybe he is downstairs,
reading. Maybe he is just getting out of the shower.
It’s these tiny reminders that hurt, the tiny moments where you think – let me just call out to him. Ah,