I went to Galveston. Nine days, a rented room with a gas fireplace, and a woman named Perpetua who ran the front desk and let me borrow her paperbacks. I ate dinner at six every night and did not wash one dish.
Brenna called eleven times the first evening. I answered on the third day, from a bench facing the water, and I said the only sentence I had prepared: I read the group chat. Then I let the silence do what silence does when there is nothing underneath it to hold.
Trevor’s family hosted that Christmas. They rented a house and split it eighteen ways and it cost them, I later learned, about four hundred dollars a head. His mother complained the entire week. Nobody made a breakfast casserole. Trevor’s brother said out loud, at the table, that he did not realize how much work this was, and Brenna heard it, and that was the sentence that finally landed where mine never had.
