“You’ve got to find someone else you can talk to, Brad. Call your mom or something. I’m sure she’d love a call from you.”
“I don’t wanna,” Brad groaned petulantly.
The knob on the front door jiggled, and Olivia saw an out, an escape from this cluster of a conversation, a reason to end the call that wouldn’t weigh on her conscience. “Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go. Drink some water and go to bed.”
Olivia ended the call as the door swung open. Margot pitched her keys into the bowl on the entry table and shut the door, slumping against it, eyes closed.
Olivia set her phone down on the coffee table beside the shoebox full of keepsakes she was sorting through, screen side down. She cleared her throat. “Hey.”
Margot jumped, elbow slamming into the door. She hissed through her teeth, cradling her arm, and Olivia cringed in sympathy. That had to have hurt.
“Hey.” Margot stepped into the room and gave a self-effacing chuckle, massaging her elbow. “It’s going to take me a second to get used to that, living with someone again.”
Olivia smiled. “You’re home early.”
Margot had left a note on the whiteboard that read game night, and Olivia had assumed she’d be home late, midnight at the earliest. It wasn’t even a quarter past ten.
“Everyone has an early morning, apparently. Everyone except me.” Margot pressed the heel of her hand into her eye and sighed. “Sorry. Ignore me. Didn’t mean to rope you into joining my pity party.” Margot dropped her chin and laughed softly, staring at the floor. “Probably not the sort of party planning you had in mind, huh?”
Margot didn’t need to apologize, not to Olivia and certainly not for having feelings.
“Do you . . . want to talk about it?”
For a split second, it seemed like Margot might take Olivia up on her offer. She opened her mouth, then sighed and shook her head. “Nah. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?” Olivia prodded. “I’m happy to listen.”
Margot raked her fingers through her hair and offered Olivia a tired smile. “I’m sure. I’ll just sleep it off.” She squinted. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Olivia followed Margot’s bleary gaze to the coffee table. “Oh. I was just going through my boxes. Finally.”
Margot stepped closer, surveying the explosion of photos smudged with fingerprints, lucky pennies, and ticket stubs. Olivia’s corsage from junior prom, dried and brittle, rested atop a stack of notes scribbled in gel pen, once passed between her and Margot during class. The tassel to her graduation cap was knotted, tangled up with a macramé friendship bracelet. Margot’s hand hovered over the stack of folded notes before she shifted, lifting a picture from the table with a smile. “I didn’t know you kept all this stuff.”
“Of course I did.” The idea of the alternative, getting rid of any of it, had never even crossed Olivia’s mind. She nodded at the bookshelves against the wall. “I noticed you had some spare shelf space out here, so I put a few of my books on the bottom shelf. I hope you don’t mind.”
She mostly read on her phone these days, but she had amassed a collection of paperbacks she couldn’t bring herself to part with, novels she loved so much she reread them, new releases from her favorite authors, and well-loved classics with cracked spines and yellowed pages that had come loose from their glue.
“’Course not.” Margot crossed the room and kneeled in front of the shelf, tilting her head and studying Olivia’s contribution. She brushed the spines with her fingers in a sort of delicate reverence that reminded Olivia of how Margot had once touched her. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“Brad didn’t like the books I read,” Olivia confessed, chewing on the edge of her thumbnail while Margot plucked a book off the shelf, skimming the back blurb before replacing it, repeating the process with another and another. “So I kept them under the bed.”
For years, she’d kept them stacked neatly out of sight because Brad hadn’t wanted them on the living room shelves, visible to visitors. He had made fun of them, deriding the covers, scoffing and calling them shallow, predictable, poorly written. On several, memorable occasions, he’d cracked them open, folding the covers back roughly, reading from them aloud, making her blush. He would hunt for the sex scenes and laugh while he read, and too many times she’d laughed along with him, shrugging when he called them trashy, downplaying her interest. Brad had accused them of giving women unrealistic expectations. Eventually she’d gotten tired of his jokes that weren’t funny, of him glaring at her while she read, all his pointed huffs and none-too-subtle sighs. She’d tucked most under the bed, the rest split between the attic and her childhood bedroom, only reading them when he wasn’t around and sticking mostly to e-books so he couldn’t see what she was reading when he was.