I nodded.

Did I wish I hadn’t told him? A little. What was the point of a weekend retreat if I couldn’t actually retreat from the one truth that seemed to stall my heartbeat every few minutes?

He looked down at his feet, toyed with a stray thread on his shorts. “I don’t know what I would do.”

“I still don’t know what to do.”

He fell quiet. I never knew how to reel a conversation back after the Dead Mother topic. And which was worse: having it with a relative stranger like this, or having it back home with someone who had known me my entire life and no longer knew how to speak to me without false brightness or syrupy sympathy?

“What’s your favorite word?”

Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?”

He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.”

I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought.

“Ranunculus,” I said after a moment.

“What?”

“Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.”

They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say.

“That’s a pretty girly answer.”

“Well, I am a girl.”

He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire.

“What about you? What’s your favorite word? I bet it’s tungsten. Or, like, amphibian.”

He quirked a smile, answering, “Regurgitate.”

Scrunching my nose, I stared at him. “That is a gross word.”

This made him smile even wider. “I like the hard consonant sounds in it. It kinda sounds like exactly what it means.”

“An onomatopoeia?”

I half expected trumpets to blast revelatory music from an invisible speaker in the wall from the way Elliot stared at me, lips parted and glasses slowly sliding down his nose.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.”

“I never thought you were an idiot,” he said quietly, looking toward the box and pulling out another book to hand to me.

For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances.

I pretended I didn’t notice.

now

wednesday, october 4

I feel like I’ve torn open some stitches overnight. Everything inside is raw—as if I’ve bruised an emotional organ. Above me, the ceiling looks drab; water stains crawl along the spidery cracks in the plaster that radiate from the light fixture in the ceiling. The fan circles lazily around and around and around the frosted globe. As they turn, the blades cut through the air, mimicking Sean’s rhythmic exhale while he sleeps beside me.