She walked home the long way.

Not because she wanted the exercise or because the weather was good, it wasn't, it was February in St. John's, which meant the sky was the colour of a headache, but because she wasn't ready to go back to the flat. The flat was the ceiling and the crack and the floor and the window and the boots, and she didn't want that yet. She wanted to stay inside the feeling a little longer. The feeling of having said it and having it be okay. The feeling of pancakes.

She turned down Long's Hill. The wind hit her sideways. She put her head down and walked.

Charlie would have liked him.

She'd said that before, at the diner, weeks ago, and she'd meant it then, but she meant it differently now. Charlie would have liked the okay. Charlie would have liked the pancakes. Charlie would have looked at Fayiz across a table and said something like he's alright, Molls in the voice he used when he meant someone was more than alright, when he meant someone had passed whatever invisible test Charlie applied to the people in her life, a test she'd never fully understood but had always trusted.

Charlie.

The memory came without warning, the way it always did, the way grief never bothered to knock.

• • •

She was in the kitchen in Cornwall. 3 a.m. She was twenty years old and she'd been asleep on the sofa because she'd been studying for something-an exam, a test, she couldn't remember now, the details had gone soft, the way details went when you'd replayed something so many times the edges wore down.

The phone rang.

Not her phone. The house phone, the one on the wall in the kitchen, the one nobody called because it was 2021 and nobody used landlines except her mother, who kept it because what if there's an emergency, Mollie, what if the power goes out and the mobiles don't work, you never think about these things.

The phone rang and she'd walked to the kitchen in the dark, not worried yet, because 3 a.m. phone calls were drunk dials or wrong numbers or Charlie, sometimes Charlie, calling from a pub or a party to tell her something stupid that couldn't wait, something he'd seen or heard or done, because Charlie lived like everything was urgent and hilarious and worth sharing at 3 a.m.

She picked up.

"Hello?"

It was her mother.

Her mother, who lived four streets away. Her mother, who hadn't used the landline in years. Her mother, who was breathing in a way that didn't sound like breathing, who was making a sound Mollie had never heard before, a sound that existed somewhere between a word and a noise and was neither, was just, air, pushed out, the sound of a body trying to do something it had no instructions for.

"Mum?"

"Mollie."

One word. Her name. And she knew. She knew from the shape of it, from the weight of it, from the way her mother said Mollie like it was the only word she had left, like every other word had been taken away and this was the one she'd held on to, the name of the child who was still alive.

"Mum, what's..."

"It's Charlie."

Two words.

The kitchen floor was cold. She didn't remember sitting down. She was standing and then she was on the floor and the phone cord was stretched to its limit and her mother was talking, her mother was saying words... accident and car and hospital and they tried and I'm sorry, love and he's gone... and the words came in but they didn't assemble. They lay there like pieces of something broken, and Mollie sat on the cold kitchen floor and thought: no. No. That's wrong. He was here. He was just here. He texted me. He texted me at 11 saying he was going out with Tommo and I said get an Uber and he said yeah yeah and that was, that was four hours ago. Four hours. You can't be gone in four hours. You can't be a person at 11 and not a person at 3.

Get an Uber, she'd said.

He hadn't.

Her mother was still talking. Her mother was asking her to come. Her mother was saying please, Mollie, please come, I can't do this by myself, I can't... and Mollie was sitting on the kitchen floor in Cornwall at 3 a.m. holding a phone that was connected to a woman who had just lost her son and she could not stand up.

She tried.

Her legs didn't work.

She tried again.

The floor was cold and the kitchen was dark and somewhere in this town her brother was in a hospital or a morgue or wherever they took you when you went from being a person to being a body and she could not stand up.

Get an Uber.

Yeah yeah.

Those were the last words. Not I love you. Not be safe. Not anything that would have mattered, that she could hold, that she could take out in moments like this and press against the wound. Get an Uber. Yeah yeah. The last conversation she would ever have with her brother was about a taxi.

She sat on the floor for a long time. The phone cord stretched. The fridge hummed. Somewhere outside, a bird started singing, because birds didn't know, birds didn't care, birds sang at 3 a.m. whether your brother was alive or not.

• • •

She was on Long's Hill.

The wind was in her face and her cheeks were wet and she didn't know when she'd started crying. She hadn't decided to. Her body had done it without asking, the way it did sometimes, the way grief bypassed every system she'd built and went straight to the part of her that was still twenty years old and sitting on a kitchen floor in Cornwall.

She walked. She didn't wipe her face. The wind pushed the tears sideways, salt against her lips. Her scarf stuck briefly to her mouth when she breathed in, damp and cold, and her fingers had gone numb inside her gloves but she didn't fix them, didn't adjust anything, as if discomfort were proof she was still here. There was no one on the hill. Just her and the wind and the cold and the crying that came from somewhere she couldn't reach and couldn't stop and didn't want to stop, because stopping meant controlling it and controlling it meant putting it away and she was tired, God she was tired, of putting things away.

Get an Uber.

Five years. Five years since the kitchen floor. Five years since the phone call and the hospital and the morgue and the funeral and the hole in the ground in Cornwall and the sound her mother made, that sound, the one Mollie heard every time she thought about calling home, the sound of a woman learning what it meant to have a child die before you, which was a sound that should not exist, which was a sound no mouth should know how to make.

She walked and cried and let it happen.

I'm gay, Fayiz.

Okay.

She cried harder. Not because of the telling. Because of the okay. Because okay was what Charlie would have said. Because Charlie had said it, more or less, when she was fourteen, when he'd seen her looking at someone's sister and had grinned and had thrown his arm around her shoulders and had said well obviously, Molls, keep up and that had been it, that had been the whole conversation, and she'd spent the rest of the afternoon feeling like the luckiest person on earth.

And now a man in a diner had said okay and eaten a triangle of pancake and hadn't asked the follow-up question and it was the closest she'd come to Charlie in five years and she was crying on Long's Hill in February because the world kept doing this, the world kept putting small kindnesses in front of her like stones across a river and she kept stepping on them and she kept not drowning and she didn't know if that was survival or something worse.

At the bottom of the hill, she stopped. Wiped her face with her sleeves. Breathed.

The card was in her pocket. Noor's card. She took it out. Looked at it. The Arts Centre on Harbour Drive. The folk series in March.

She put it back.

At home, the flat was cold. The crack was there. The plant was on the sill. She took off her coat and hung it on the hook and stood in the hallway and pressed her forehead against the wall and breathed.

"You would have liked him, Charlie," she said to the wall. "The okay. You would have liked the okay."

Charlie didn't answer.

But the flat was quiet in a different way tonight. Not the empty kind. The kind that comes after you've let something out that's been locked up for a long time. The kind that feels like a room with the window cracked open, cold air coming in, but also the first breath you've taken in a while that fills both lungs.

She watered the plant.

Fifty-eight days.

☕︎