Page 89 of Sleepover

But it’s not the same without her, and all three of us know it. It feels…uneven. Like she should be there, on the other side of the sleeping bags, whispering to Madden, looking up to meet my eyes from time to time.

I miss her fiercely, and she’s right next door.

I trudge upstairs, feeling the weight of the day. Brooks has sprawled on the couch in my living room with a beer he’s lifted from my fridge. When I come in with a beer of my own, he lifts his bottle in greeting.

“How’s your neighbor? For that matter, where’s your neighbor?” And then, because he’s my brother and my best friend, even if he is an asshole, and can clearly see the expression on my face, “Oh, shit, Sawyer, what the hell happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Bullshit. You look like I hacked in and deleted your season pass to the NFL. Did she dump your ass?”

I hesitate while I try to figure out the answer to that—had she? Or had we reached a mutual decision that we were a bad idea? I honestly wasn’t sure.

“It wasn’t going to work out.”

Brooks squints at me, brow furrowed. “It wasn’t going to work out? Or it wasn’t working out? Because that’s two different things. You going to tell me what the actual fuck happened?”

I bring him up to date. I tell him how after I talked to him, I realized how much I did like her. I tell him about how we talked about giving it a try, how we went to the wedding together and it was—good. Better than good. I tell him about the book landslide and the journal and coming out of the bathroom to find her looking like she’d been kicked in the gut.

And then I tell him about Trevor. And what he did to her.

“And I can’t do that to her. What Trevor did.”

Brooks is shaking his head. “Man, some guys.”

“I know, right?”

“But you know it’s a totally different situation. Still having feelings for your dead wife and cheating on your actual wife—those are two totally different things.”

“Yeah, but to her, not so much.”

“Well, isn’t that more about her than about you?”

“I just—it’s probably for the best, right? It was getting complicated. Someone was going to get hurt.”

Brooks makes a short, harsh noise. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I know. Caramel, right?”

My words are light, but there’s a tightness in my chest. I’m familiar with it. I met it for the first time when Lucy was sick, when it took up permanent residence. It had eased for a while, recently—but I think it was just the distraction of sex with Elle. Now it’s back, maybe to stay.

“Hey,” Brooks says. “You want to go drinking with Chase and Jack and me Friday night? I could use a single wingman. Those two are no fun anymore.”

The thought of it—of getting drunk, flirting, picking someone up, hooking up—doesn’t appeal, but Brooks is looking at me with the closest thing he’s got to a hangdog expression, and I can’t say no. “Sure.”

“We’ll get you laid. Drown your sorrows. All that.”

I don’t even bother arguing with him.

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