Page 43 of A Cure for Recovery

Dana surveys the yard, nods to herself, and then claps her hands together. “Right. Leo’s getting the cornhole setup out of the car. I’m gonna go help him, then check and see what Lisa needs help with inside. What time’s Noah getting here?”

Six-thirty.”

“We should be good, then.”

Noah finally had that conversation with Natalia, albeit a month after Lawson encouraged him to do so. She said yes, and flashed her new rock at them – “Holy shit,” Lawson muttered, “maybe you should go try to be a Narcotics captain,” to which Tommy bashed him over the head with a couch pillow – via Skype, but when they talked about having an actual engagement party, small and intimate, Lisa said, “Why don’t we have it here at the house.” So that’s what they’re doing.

It’s also Tommy and Lawson’s anniversary tomorrow, but both of them agreed not to say anything about it, not wanting to overshadow Noah and Nat’s moment.

“Where’s your husband?” Dana asks, frowning. “He’s supposed to be setting up drinks.”

“I’ll go see.”

There are tubs of ice on the deck, full of beer and soda, and a few bottles of the wine Lawson and Lisa like best. That’s the drinks, then, but no sign of the man himself.

“Law?” Tommy calls as he steps into the kitchen. “Babe, you here?”

Lisa’s in the pantry, rooting through the shelves, and calls through the open door: “He’s in the living room, sweetie.”

“Okay, thanks.”

He is in the living room, as advertised, but not on the sofa in front of the TV, nor at the liquor cabinet. He’s standing by the window in the corner, at the desk that houses the ancient desktop where Lisa pays the bills online, and the house’s lone printer – which is chugging and wheezing and churning out paper marked with rows and rows of tiny, cramped print.

“Oh, hey.” Tommy hastens his steps to cross the room. “It’s still going?” In the busyness of Dana and Leo’s arrival, and last-minute party prep, he forgot that Lawson hit Print something like two hours ago.

“Finishing up,” Lawson says with a grimace. “It ran out of ink, and then the tray got jammed. But I got it fixed.”

Tommy joins him in staring down at the struggling little ink jet machine, and his eyes land on the wordsTHE END, as the last page settles, and stills. The printer coughs, and then whines, and goes quiet.

His pulse picks up. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.” Lawson sounds more than a little dazed, and his movements are slow when he reaches to gather the stack of pages. He rearranges them, raps them on the edge of the desk, and then tucks them at the end of amuchlarger stack of pages. A soaring stack, in fact, which tilts like the Tower of Pisa before Lawson catches it and realigns it.

Tommy whistles. “How many pages is that?”

“One thousand, four hundred, and twenty-nine,” Lawson murmurs.

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit,” Lawson agrees.

Tommy reaches, and then hesitates. Turns his head to regard Lawson, whose eyes are wide and unblinking behind the lenses of his glasses. It’s taken a month to finish his space opera – or the first draft of it, anyway – but the last week he’s written nearly non-stop, hunched over his laptop at his desk when Tommy falls asleep, and sometimes still there when Tommy wakes. The screen’s been bothering his eyes, and he hasn’t worn his contacts in days.

“Can I?” Tommy asks, gesturing to the loose-bound, printed-out manuscript.

“Yeah.” Lawson finally blinks, and looks at him, and hooks a crooked smile. “Yeah,” he says, surer. “I wrote it for you.”

Oh, that…yeah, that’s giving him heart palpitations. He lets out a shaky breath, and edges in closer to the desk. Rests his hand on the top page, the cover page of this impossible, miraculous stack.

There’s no title. Lawson insists the publisher will want to come up with something on-brand and timely, and that whatever he picks will be a placeholder. The page reads:

Alloy

By Lawson Granger

Tommy’s finger traces the name, over and over.Granger. Granger, Granger, Granger. His name. My name. Our name.

The next page contains only two words. The dedication.

---