Chapter 11

She watched Eli tidy up the last bits of their meal together, as he’d done a thousand times before. They’d had such a steady, yet fun life together. Chores. Work. Play. Always play. The silly little games they’d relaxed into.

The rhythm, the song of their lives together. The moments, hitting all the varied notes in a masterpiece of—yes, finally. This is the one. I'm home.

He's my home.

And now they were here together, three years later.

Ugh.

A sick feeling descended over her. Nothing about this night was natural. Nothing.

The rats were a perfect, maudlin touch. As if the universe had planted them there, to keep her in reality.

He turned from the counter and from an especially dirty spot she’d winced at that he’d taken to scrubbing spotless, then wrapped a napkin around the last couple of crackers. “Everything's tidied up."

Anger lit in her. First, the speech. Then this.

The jerk, always taking care of her.

Except when he didn’t. He’d gone, left her holding all their life plans, their future, in her two upturned, cupped hands. She’d watched all of it, every last drop, drain out onto the ground. Every single damn bit of it. Where it pooled, stayed in existence for a few scant moments, like water. Then slowly dried up. Gone. Existed no more.

Only as a beautiful memory of what should have been.

Her gaze flicked around the room in her upset, alighted on the little white tack above the door, and something hit her. Ow.

"I'm going upstairs."

His hands stalled in mid-wrap, blinked at the abruptness of her pronouncement. "Okay."

"I want to be alone.”

Eyes still wide for another second then he relaxed. Ass. He knew he had no say over anything she did. His voice was calm, but—was there a slight edge there too? "No problem."

"Good." She turned on her heels, stalked down the hallway, gripped the huge wooden ball at the top of the bannister of the staircase. She stepped on to the small landing, heard the creak. A million feelings colliding into each other.

As she got close to the next landing at the top of the stairs though, just before the last step up, the air shifted. Cold.

She’d have to push through it.

She'd come here to find a way to dream again. To reclaim herself, recapture the pre-debacle Tish. The woman who saw possibility everywhere.

Not the woman who'd been so shut down she’d sleepwalked through the next few years of her life.

She stepped up onto the second floor, and suddenly, she couldn't wait to find it. The reason she'd come back.

She took in the burgundy paint in the hallway on the lower half of the wall, the dingy flat green on the top. The hole two thirds of the way up the wall where the brass fixture both she and Eli had loved so much on their first walk-through with the realtor had been. Vandalized or simply removed by the last owner to grab a few bucks.

She cast a glance down the hallway.

And the scene from the past floated into her mind.

She'd laid on a blanket on the old carpet, tucked in under a ton of blankets they'd brought so they wouldn't freeze. He'd run downstairs for the little white and aqua package of moist towelettes she'd brought—something to clean up with after making love. She'd told him not to bother.

He’d mumbled, grabbed a bed sheet, wrapped it around his torso, and slapped his bare feet into his boots, untied. What a picture he'd cut. She'd run her gaze up and down his length, lifted an appraising eyebrow. “New look?"

He'd flashed her a debonair one back. “Not smart to have clothes on around you, woman."

She'd snorted, laughed. Hadn't been able to think of a retort, but the enjoyment he took in her body warmed her in a way that had nothing to do with room temperatures. “It isn’t, is it."

He'd nodded. "Yup. Things strain. It's just not nice." And with a teasing smile, he'd disappeared out the door, and she'd heard him stomping down the hallway.

She’d grabbed her chance. "Can you grab me a tea?"

"K, T-Bear. On its way."

That would keep him downstairs for a few more minutes, boiling the water in the hot pot she'd brought for their clandestine overnight stay.

Gratified as the furnace kicked into life, she’d fumbled in her knapsack, pulled out the little book, popped it open, and wrote in her latest entry. Quickly.

Words flew. When she was done, she looked over the page, lay her open palm reverently on it. Felt the paper, felt the words.

She'd put down what was in her soul, and in her heart. It was good.

Then abruptly went to snap the small diary shut, and her eyes snagged on the final words she'd written on the endpapers.

“All my dreams have come true with Eli. But there are so many more waiting to come true as well. When I next open this, it will be three years from now, and I'll have a whole new pile of stuff to report on. I commit to this. This is the last entry in the time capsule of Tish and Eli. Dated—"

She blinked. Somehow she’d made it down the hallway.

But she was here now, at the threshold of her goal. The bedroom door in front of her.

She sniffed the air, smelled the stale, unmovingness of it.

It’s just a room, Tish. Get a damn grip.

She forced herself through the dank curtain of the past her memories had erected. She was in. Her gaze panned around the room. One heat register there…and…

Huh? There’d been two wall-mounted registers. And now…only one. What?

She’d worked with the one on the big wall, not on the shorter wall, with the window out onto the alleyway. That one was still there, as before.

But yeah. She’d worked with the one over there. She'd tucked her diary into the opening, deep inside the wall, about a hands-breath to the right, once she’d pulled the register out. It had been safe, barely warm on the side. The air didn’t divert, just funneled on through.

Where the hell was the register?

She’d known she might not find the diary, but it was funny how much she'd depended on doing so, on reading her entries just before that important jumping off point in her life. She wanted desperately to recapture the dreams of her younger self. Reclaim the spirit she’d had before that night gutted her and knocked her mute for years.

She'd thought ahead, considered it might be hard to dislodge the register, if they'd redone the baseboard around it, that type of thing. She'd brought the hammer, the wedge, determined to have at it.

But she'd never thought the register would actually be gone.

Looked like she had no chance in hell of finding her diary.