Page 27 of Knotting on Heaven's Door

The practical part of my brain voted alphabetical—quick retrieval, tidy logic. The restless part wanted aesthetics: a gradient of spines shifting from emerald to jade to pale mint, matching the soft greens I’d painted along the living-room wall. In the end, vanity won. Now the shelves looked like a rolling meadow, and if finding a specific title took longer, well… beauty had a price.

Spray-edged editions posed a new problem. What was the point of splurging on floral-stenciled page edges if no one could see them? So I hunted down a narrow picture-ledge shelf, mounted it eye-level, and faced those beauties out—coversframed by their own painted blooms. A one-day project turned three once I realized the brackets weren’t level. I redid them twice, because crooked lines make my skin itch.

The kitchen was next. I hardly cook for myself anymore—meals at the firm are faster, cheaper, unavoidable—but on rare days off I crave silence and a stove that listens only to me. I polished every pot, rearranged the spice drawer alphabetically (here efficiency mattered), and treated myself to a new cast-iron skillet heavy enough to double as self-defense.

Then the couch. I bought far too many pillows—nesting instinct gone corporate credit card. Moss velvet, sage linen, one embroidered with tiny white wolves I pretended I didn’t buy on purpose. I fluffed and arranged them until the sofa looked like a soft green wave. When I sank into it that night, the cushions sighed around me like they’d been waiting.

Flowers went everywhere. Ferns in the bathroom, eucalyptus in the entryway, potted jasmine on the windowsill that opened to a slice of sky and the hum of late-August cicadas. The whole apartment glowed green—my favorite color, the color of new things growing.

By the time I finished, cardboard boxes lined the hallway for recycling, and my muscles ached in that satisfying, post-shift way. I brewed chamomile, curled into my pillow fort, and let the clean scent of paint and eucalyptus wrap around me like a promise:

Here, in this little sanctuary I built with my own two hands, no one could take anything from me I didn’t choose to give.

As I lay there, curled into the nest of soft pillows with a half-drunk cup of tea going cold in my hands, the quiet crept in like fog—soft, slow, impossible to stop.

And with it came the memories.

Adam’s laugh, low and rough, filling the kitchen of our first apartment as he burned toast for the third time that week.The way he used to touch my lower back absentmindedly when passing behind me. The way he looked at me like I was the only steady thing in his world.

I blinked hard against the burn rising in my throat. It had been ten years, and still—still—the ache hit in strange moments. Not always in the grief-soaked ones, but in the quiet ones. The simple ones.

The ones like this.

I’d give anything for him to see this place. To see what I’ve built. Not the new apartment, exactly, but everything.Allof it. The company. The kitchen. The strength I scraped together from the rubble of losing him.

Sometimes I wondered if he’d be proud.

Most days, I believed he would.

But deep down, no matter how many years passed, no matter how competent or whole I forced myself to be, there was a space inside me only he had ever touched. A bond that had once wrapped itself around my soul like warm silk. Unshakeable. Intimate. Safe.

Sometimes—especiallyon nights like this—I missed the bond more than I missed the man.

Not because Adam wasn’t unforgettable. He was.

But because the bond… the bond made even the silence feel full. It meant someone was always there. Feeling what you felt. Holding what you couldn’t.

And now… there was just me.

My smartwatch buzzed against my wrist.

I looked down. The screen lit up:Pill time.

I set the tea aside, stood, and walked over to the small drawer in the kitchen. I opened it with the kind of muscle memory that came from years of practice, fingers closing around the amber bottle with the white cap.

Suppressants.

I twisted it open, took two, and washed them down with cold water from the sink. No hesitation. No pause.

Not tonight.

The pills dulled it all—the longing, the craving, the instinctive pull toward connection that never quite went away. They made me functional. Professional. They made memeagain.

Still, as I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes, I let myself pretend, just for a moment, that he was still out there.

That if I reached through the silence, someone would reach back.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find another mate.

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