In my periphery, his hand stalls. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“I’m working from home today.” The lie slips off my tongue like silk.
Theo’s expression turns sharp with awareness, his grin sharp with it, too. “What do you know? Me too.”
I believe that about as much as he believes me, but I don’t have time to push. Paul walks out with a tray of food.
“Lunch is served!”
“You should put on a shirt,” I say as I push past Theo to get to my seat.
He runs a hand over his stomach, grinning. “Nah, I’m good.”
Well, that makes one of us.
Five
Theo keeps his shirt off the entire meal. It’s obscene. My eyeballs hurt from the strain of not looking.
Paul picked up sandwiches from one of the best spots in Marin County. The homemade bread is crusty perfection, and at least half of it ends up in my lap, little sourdough snowflakes drifting from my mouth every time I take a bite. It takes everything in me not to pick up each fleck with my finger after I’ve demolished my sandwich.
Our conversation flows smoothly thanks to Paul, who asks about my job （I continue the lie and say it’s great）， what I do in my free time （I wing it, since hike and doomscroll aren’t legitimate answers）， and how I got into photography.
Here I can be honest and tell him how when I was twelve, I picked up an old camera of Gram’s, which was collecting dust on her bookshelf.
Thomas tried to fight me for it, but I came out of our wrestling match victorious, albeit bruised like a peach. I started using it constantly so Thomas wouldn’t have access, but it turned into a genuine love. An obsessive one.
Paul smiles at this. “I’m familiar with the feeling. Now that you’re done with your meal, should I go grab what I wanted to show you today?”
“Yes,” I say enthusiastically. Theo lets out a soft huff. Not a laugh. Something rustier.
Paul disappears into the house, and the silence stretches between us.
“So why aren’t you doing your photography thing full time?” Theo asks finally.
I eye him, and the flake of bread caught in his chest hair. Disgusting. I want to pick that one up with my finger the most.
“Because you can’t just do things,” I say. “It’s not that easy.”
One eyebrow raises slowly, like a bridge lifting for a ship. “If anyone can just do things, it’s you, Shepard. You’ve been just doing things as long as I’ve known you.”
“You sound like an unhinged Nike ad.” I lean back in my seat, tilting my face to soak up the sun’s warmth. “It’s easy to invest time in something you love when you have the money for it.”
“You’d be surprised.” I look over at him, indeed surprised by the bitter edge in his voice. He runs a hand over his chest, dislodging the crumb in the process （RIP）， and shifts in his seat. “You specifically can do anything you put your mind to, is what I mean. You were always like that in high school. Singularly focused, especially with photography. Good at everything you tried. Not as good as me, but—”
I snort, my chest tight. I want to be that version of Noelle, but I’m so far away from her, she feels like a different person.
“I can tell you love it still, is all,” he finishes.
I try to deaden my curiosity, but that’s like asking me not to breathe. “How’s that?”
“The deranged look in your eyes when you talk about it.”
“It’s just . . . not for me. I learned that lesson a while ago.”
Theo’s gaze turns sharp. I avert my eyes from his attention, that face and those shoulders, the skin, which upon closer inspection, is quietly freckled. I take in the backyard instead, needing space from his wordless probing. It’s small, immaculate. There are several raised beds along the perimeter of the pine fence, several bags of soil open and sagging against them.
“Your granddad’s house is beautiful.” I focus on a hummingbird flitting around a tall plant with tubular red flowers. Wish I knew their name. “How long has he been here?”
Theo removes his hat and tosses it onto the table, running a hand through his hair. His temples are damp. That shouldn’t be so hot. “Since February. He was in LA, but my grandma died last fall. He was getting lonely, so I moved him up here.”
My heart sinks so fast the world tilts. Paul’s gold band flashes in my mind. “I’m—I’m sorry. About your grandma.”
Theo shifts, uncomfortable. “Thanks. It’s not the same as what you’re going through. I mean, it was very sad, obviously, but she married my granddad when I was a kid, long after he and my dad’s mom divorced. Both of my biological grandmothers are still alive, but I’m not close to them. Not like I am with Granddad, anyway.”
“Grief is grief. You don’t have to qualify it.”
“Some grief is different, though,” he says, looking out at the yard. “You can be sad but be okay. If my granddad dies, you know—”
He stops, like it’s too painful to think about. That if a standin for the other word he can’t say out loud: when. I sense the same connection between him and Paul as what I had with Gram. That soulmate thing, the string connecting two people, longer than death, further than forever.
I want Theo to sketch out his family tree for me. I’m getting crumbs of so many different things, like the flakes still littering my lap, and it makes me hungrier. I know Theo is an only child, that his dad pulled him aside after every tennis and soccer match he attended, talking to him in low, intense tones while his mom watched. That he never looked happy with his son, nor with his wife when she intervened. Remembering that makes it hard to believe he came from Paul. Is that Theo’s grandma’s influence, the sternness Theo seems to have inherited, too?
I hate being curious about him. I’ve fought against it since the beginning. But I’m me and I need to know things, so I open my mouth to ask more questions. I barely inhale when he shakes his head, his expression shifting from melancholy to wry.
“Don’t make this earnest and uncomfortable.”
“No, totally. Emotions, right?” I pretend to gag. “Disgusting.”
He doesn’t respond, and a tiny, microscopic, very small part of me is disappointed. My blood runs faster in my veins when we talk. But surely that’s just irritation.
Theo stands, swiping a t-shirt from the chair at the head of the table. He eases it over his head, making it look like porn somehow. My body pulls tight.
One thing is certain: I’ll never figure him out. I don’t want to, and he’d never let me anyway. So I busy myself with brushing the crumbs from my lap, letting them fall to the ground. The birds can have them.
* * *
Paul emerges a few minutes later, a banker’s box in his arms.
“Wow.” I gape as he lowers the box onto the table. “We’re going to be here for a while, huh?”
To my right, Theo sighs. I give him a droll look over my shoulder, where he’s parked himself against the railing, but he’s not looking. He’s been ignoring me since our near-brush with human emotion, grimly tapping out messages on his phone.
Paul takes Theo’s seat next to me. “Some of this is your grandmother’s. We saw each other once after we separated—before I sent the letter you found—and she gave me things for safekeeping.”