Page 191 - In Five Years

Chapter Thirty-Seven

He pulls back first. He drops his hand. We stare at each other, breathing hard.
My coat is on the floor, crumbled like a body after a car crash. I turn my eyes
from him and pick it up.

“I—” he starts. I close my eyes. I don’t want him to say I’m sorry. He doesn’t.
He leaves it there.
I walk to the wall. I know what I’ll find, but I want to see it. The final,

culminating piece of evidence. There, hanging on the wall, is Bella’s birthday
gift: I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY.
“I don’t know what to say,” Aaron says from somewhere behind me.

I don’t turn around. “It’s okay.” I say. “I don’t, either.”
“All of this—” he says. “It’s all so wrong. None of this should be happening.”
He’s right, of course. It shouldn’t. What could we have done differently? How

could we have avoided this? This impossible, unthinkable end.
I turn around. I look at him. His golden, shining face. This thing that sits

between us, now made manifest.
“You should go,” I say. “Or I should.”
“I should,” he says.
“Okay.”

“Your stuff is all unpacked. Bella hired someone to do the closet. Your things
are all here.”

“The closet.”
His cell phone rings then, disrupting the air molecules, disentangling us from
the moment. He answers.
“Hey,” he says gently. Too gently. “Yes. Yes. We’re here. Hang on.”

He holds the phone out to me. I take it.