Chapter Text
Max had barely remembered picking up the remote to the garage.
It was sat there on the kitchen island, inches from the morning’s paper.
She’d discarded it initially, because it wasn’t important. But the longer that she found herself trying to ignore it, the itchier she felt. She tried to brush it aside, sit through the discomfort. It was a tickle in the back of her throat which would become a fit of choked coughs if she did so much as swallow, speak, do anything to try to rid it.
It was the same sort of itch as the lamp that first time, and that light switch, her locker combination – certainly just as intense, though she was uncertain whether there were consequences surrounding it.
She hoped there weren’t, presumed there wouldn’t – it was a garage door remote, for fuck’s sake, when did she ever even touch this remote – but couldn’t rule it out.
She tried to ignore the remote.
Max wandered into circles around the kitchen island, paced the living and diving room as she picked up the oddities discarded around with the mess of the past twenty-four hours, opened (and then closed, opened, closed, opened, slammed) the cupboards. Wandered into her father’s office, sat at the desk, flicked a thumbnail through the boring-looking letters placed in the holder.
Headed back into the kitchen, grabbed a glass of water, tried to sip at it as she marvelled at the little black box in the centre of the kitchen island and tried to figure which of the two of them was winning the stand-off.
She was pretty certain she was losing it.
(Losing her fight with a two-inch bit of plastic, that was – just to clarify. Though, maybe she was personally losing it in general, too.)
Max lurched at the counter.
The intent had been to throw the remote across the room, maybe at the photos on the wall, allow herself to fall to the floor and wrack out sobs all over again, split the newfound quiet of the empty house.
Instead, she found herself cradling it to her chest, running her fingers over the buttons, and, eventually, she dragged her feet to the door, outside.
But Max didn’t break things; she tried to fix them.
-
She couldn’t sleep. Not after everything.
It was all whirring. Tonight, Marcus, Ginny. Abby and Tris. Mostly, Marcus.
She knew that Ginny had come in, had heard her mother speaking to her, asking her to leave, heard her quiet sobs and footsteps pass down the hall, heard the front door open and close, as she had sat on the bathroom tiles, head between her knees, tapping her way through the Instagram stories, people from school, everybody at the party, Sophie.
(Had she been removed from Abby’s close friends? Or had Abby just not posted on her close friends today?)
Selfishly, Max wondered if Ginny seeing Marcus tonight the way that she’d been seeing him for weeks would bring her back, or at least elicit a conversation between them which didn’t centre around the odds of her overreaction about it all.
(It was wishful thinking)
She was sat on the staircase now, cheek pressed against the bars. She could hear her mother crying quietly from the living room, knew that her parents were talking, debating, weighing every hard choice up– she wanted to listen to what they were saying, but she’d have to be in the room with them for that.
It was past midnight when her mother came out into the hallway. Ellen looked surprised, but forced a smile quickly, her face still crumpled and the skin around her eyes puffy and pink.
“Oh, honey, it’s late. Go to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.”
It surprised her how small and broken her voice sounded.
“I’m sure you’ll be able to sleep better in your bed, rather than sat out here.”
She contemplated, managed a small nod, wiped her cheeks which had become sticky with dried tears.
“Is he going?” she asked as she pulled herself up with the bannister, clinging to it as she feared both possible responses, and her mother just looked at her in a way which meant she didn’t want to say the words out loud, put them into the world where they’d become a truth.
Yes, she thought. The harrowed look on her face cemented it.
“I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow, okay?”
But Max had an inkling that they probably wouldn’t.
-
She stepped out the house, made her way down the driveway and down to the garage.
She realised that, for the first time in a long time, the street was deathly quiet. It was the first day of summer break for anyone in the town under the age of eighteen, and any ordinary weekday for the rest of the adult world. Only a handful of residents on their quiet crescent had children living at home now, and most of them were out at work. Or retired. Normal people, living normal, ordinary lives.
As for Georgia’s house now; well, it was all done. No reporters, no sirens, no cars parked out the front of the house. No traffic of intrigued residents detouring down this road way on their walks, drives, runs, to catch up on the very latest rare drama of Wellsbury.
Things had to returned to the way they had before, and yet now everything felt completely different.
Perhaps it was peaceful, the quiet. But to her, it felt too quiet, too overwhelming. Max needed noise. She needed busy, she needed too much to remember, the constant dings of notifications she could barely keep up with, needed to the constant voice messages speaking garbage which she’d fallen accustomed to sending and receiving.
(The hadn’t ever lied, that one time to Marcus in the hallway, or in the way that she begged her friends to tell her why they were acting off. She needed the validation that everything was okay, that she wasn’t entirely on her own in the world, that people cared, to keep her upright whilst the rest of it was falling apart.)
(She never could have been with Silver and her so very lacklustre communication style.)
The pressed the upward arrow on the remote, waited as the garage door slowly opened.
There it was– the studio her parents had crafted for her brother in desperation over his battle with depression, only for his depression to make him abuse.
A couple of sketchbooks with what looked like a handful of pages filled, and a canvas decorated with a splatter of paint. A couple of boxes of HB pencils still unopened, paintbrushes still soft and beige, paints with the caps still screwed tight. His bike was there, back from the police station as of two days ago, in the place it always was, but, yeah, that was the only evidence that suggested he’d once been there.
Max chewed at the lip, an emptiness settling in the pit of her stomach.
Whatever she had expected from the garage, she hadn’t expected it to feel so devoid of Marcus.
She hadn’t seen them that morning. Her family, as in. Her mom had opted to take Marcus, packing up and setting off to someplace she didn’t yet know the name or location of, perhaps in Boston, perhaps in Worcester, or maybe even further west. Someplace far away from here. She hadn’t heard them leave, hadn’t been given the chance to say goodbye, just woken up at eleven to an empty, silent house. Her father was at work; she’d heard his car leave early, only slightly before she’d finally drifted off to sleep, some time close to five. She presumed he’d be home late, as would Ellen, both constructing excuses to delay returning home to a completely different house.
For the rest of the day, it would just be her.
She didn’t want it to be just her.
She didn’t want to be home alone today.
She didn’t want this dead silence, the constant reminder that everyone was gone, and all the wonderings of why, all those mind maps in her head about anything and everything tangling to knots in her stomach.
She didn’t think she could survive in this reality.
Wanted to back to the place where everything was okay, before slowly, yet suddenly, it all went wrong.
But she didn’t know where that place was.
-
Maxine Baker never skipped. Well… sometimes she did. Only for super-important things, and also, not really.
But then, there she was, handle on the front door twenty minutes before the final bell of the day was due to ring Twenty minutes before her official end of sophomore year.
That ‘perfect attendance’ she had picked up for this year was looking rather ironic now.
Her father worked from home so many days per week, in the office just off the front hall. Absolutely not to take advantage, but she knew that she could get in and out fairly unnoticed if he was at his desk, as long as she ducked under the window and ran past his door. Or maybe he’d be so immersed in his meetings that he wouldn’t realise she was early home, and she could play it cool later.
She shut the door behind her, aimed to make a beeline for the staircase.
“Marcus?”
Crap.
Her mother being home was plausible, but unusual.
Max pursed her lips, slowly placed her bag down on the bottom step.
She took a deep breath.
“It’s me, mom.”
Ellen emerged into her eye line, hovering halfway between the kitchen and the living area, apron on, hands held up, wet and soapy from washing up.
For a moment, she seemed to relax, a weary look crossing her, but then her face screwed up again, contorting with a thousand questions.
“You’re home early.”
There was a twinge in her mother’s voice, her eyebrows raised in suspicion as she glanced past her, at the grandfather clock in the hall.
Max weighed up how worth it lying would be.
“I skipped the assembly.”
“Maxine–”
“I didn’t feel well.”
Max hated that her voice cracked at the penultimate syllable. She stepped into the living room, passing Ellen to collapse onto the sofa, curling up with her head between her knees. It seemed to provoke her mother; Ellen’s face softened, and she walked over to her, pressed her hand against Max’s forehead.
She knew she’d fail the test; she was rosy pink and warm from walking home in the sun, but nothing which indicated illness.
“Another headache?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You’re getting a lot of those at the moment. Maybe we should go to the doctor.”
Max shook her head.
“It’s probably just stress,” she declined, “and I probably didn’t drink enough today, either.”
Ellen sighed, spun on her heel, back towards the kitchen, pulling a glass down from the cabinet and heading over to the refrigerator.
“You’re too young to be stressed, Maxine,” she sighed, ice clattering down from the dispenser. “Wait until you’re a parent to two teenagers.” She walked back into the living room, glass in hand, passing it down to her daughter. Max sipped at it, grimacing as the frigid water nipped at her the back of her throat.
“Need an Advil?”
“I’ve had one.”
Ellen nodded, seemed to believe the lie, sat down on the opposite end of the couch. Hands to her side. Uncomfortable. Smile too wide, eyes too wild. Suspicious. Max narrowed her eyes, a sickened feeling settling in her stomach.
It was probably the aftermath of the other evening still at the forefront. The Baker house had been uncomfortable the past few days. Like a favourite sweater which had been washed on the wrong setting and had become tight, itchy.
(Okay, so that was a mental scar from the first summer of middle school, when Ellen had decided to try and give them the responsibility of laundry… never again.)
Max sighed, reaching for the TV remote from the coffee table as a distraction, something to fill the empty quiet of the room. An episode of Fixer Upper came on the screen.
Max alternated between starting at her toes, and flicking her eyes in her mom’s direction, watching as she stared stressfully at her phone, typing something with one hand.
She knew that something was up, bothering her. She was trying not to think about it, to ignore her mother’s creased forehead. But regardless of the domestic stuff of the past forty-eight hours, this afternoon was really one of those ‘I need my mom’ moments. Max knew that much, and maybe now would be the better time, before her dad finished work, before Marcus wandered back.
She put her phone down on the arm of the couch, stared up from her socks.
“So, I think Abby d–”
“Your brother failed.”
Max’s words, and her heart, stopped.
She sprung up immediately, water spilling over the side of the glass onto the denim of her jeans.
“What?”
Her mother, tears in her eyes, was still smiling through it; that frantic panic in her voice, the complete detachment between the words and her feelings.
“He didn’t tell us, Max.” Her mother seems on the verge of hysteria, as if she either needed five wines or had already had five wines. “I know that he’s not entirely academic, and that he was suspended, and that he doesn’t study as much as he probably should, and I know that we’ve relaxed that a bit with all that’s been going on– but this? This isn’t just one F on an assignment – this is bad. This has been going on for a long time. And I know that things haven’t exactly been great, but maybe I underestimated things– oh, I don’t know!”
Now wasn’t really the time to be telling her mother that, actually, she probably had underestimated things. That wasn’t entirely decision to make, and was frankly unimportant at this point.
“Why didn’t the school say anything?”
Ellen shrugged.
“They said that they did.”
“So, they spoke to him about this before.” Max concluded closed her eyes in despair, exhaled deeply as she leaned back on the couch. “He’s a teenage boy. How were they meant to expect him to tell you anything himself?”
“You tell me everything— I think you do, anyway.”
Kind of. Pretty much. Maybe.
“Well, yes.” She was stumbling over her words. “But I don’t anything to hide, and I’m also not depressed, so there’s also that.”
“He’s been taking his meds…”
“And drinking on them.”
“Yes, well, that’s actually not very helpful right now, Max.”
“Well, it’s relevant!” She stood up, passed her mother on the way to the kitchen, ducking her head so that her mother couldn’t see her clamping down on her lip, trying so hard to hold herself back. “Please tell me you’re not going to switch off with this again. He has a problem. It goes deeper than him failing this year. Please.”
“You’re not the parent, Max.”
“You told me I needed to take care of him.” Max pulled the drawer out of the dishwasher out with a little too much force, the rest of the glasses clattering to the front, displacing, a wine glass almost falling and smashing on the floor. Didn’t anybody load this thing properly? “Isn’t that what I’m trying to do?”
“Some things just aren’t your responsibility,” Ellen sighed, shaking her head. “This is one of those things, Max. You’re too young to be dealing with this like you’re trying to. We need you to step back a bit.”
She flinched, the words hit her like razor blades from every angle.
“Oh, you say this now? After– after the other night?”
“Max–”
She felt her chest tighten, tears stinging at her eyes, and it was too much this time.
She really needed to get out of here.
She sniffed, ducked her head, tried to shield her face as she fled past her mother, headed for the staircase.
“I’m going upstairs for a bit,” she whispered. “Call me when you need a hand with dinner.”
-
She could leave it all in the dust.
Perhaps Georgia had a point, in skipping town whenever she needed to.
Max hadn’t ever considered leaving Wellsbury. Not properly, seriously. As in, move away for college? Yeah, sure. Like, obviously, that had been a consideration. Of course it was.
But after that? When she was an adult, allowed to make adult choices about where the live and what colour for the kitchen cabinets, how to live without anyone’s immediate redirection if she did it all wrong.
She hadn’t thought about the after that.
And she thought a lot. So, maybe it was something to now overthink– the fact that she had never thought about an after.
(Not to try and find meanings and definitions in every minute thing, but also, Max considered that this was now probably a valid thing to think about and consider and look for at least some ounce of meaning in.)
What did she even want for college? Seriously. Julliard? Or was she destined for something else. She had the grades… could go to Yale… or Harvard, or NYU like Sophie…
(No, not NYU. Well? Maybe. But not Sophie. She didn’t need to think about Sophie right now. She wanted to, and it was hard not to, but, uhh– nope. Absolutely not.)
So, Yale or Harvard. Or somewhere else. Harvard was closer. She could go there, come back to Wellsbury whenever anyone needed her to.
Or Julliard.
(But did she like even acting that much? Properly, seriously? Did she feel strongly about it? Did she feel strongly about wanting anything exclusively for herself that much?)
What was she even thinking about to begin with?
She dazed off across the road at the Miller house, red brick concealed mostly behind the full leaves of the trees surrounding the property at this time of year.
That was it.
Georgia.
Marcus’ motorbike had been returned two days ago. She didn’t remember the circumstances of which, because he had been grounded since Mousse, and presumably not allowed to ride it. But it was there, pride of place in the garage, let’s still in the ignition as if he was still home, ready for him to ride off at a second’s notice.
She assessed the situation.
She didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, but she knew that if you left an engine running in a garage for too long, eventually enough carbon monoxide would build to kill you.
The thought should have scared her, but instead just lingered longer than it should have; a guest overrunning their stay. A ghost standing down the hallway, staring, unmoving, completely still. A slow haunting, into an eerie acceptance.
It wasn’t something she’d considered before.
It wasn’t that she had never felt off– but when she had felt off before, there had been things around to keep her sane, entertained, purposed. Theatre. MANG. School. Girls. Family. Marcus.
But theatre and school were out for summer, and Silver was done, and Sophie was a thought she was trying to distance, as she would be gone soon, too.
(Oh, shit– she wasn’t over Sophie at all, was she?)
And MANG… what even was MANG, anymore? After this semester, and, well, the whole past year? It had been MAN, and then it had transitioned into MANG, and it had felt oh-so natural, and then it had turned to MN, then M + ANG, and then MANG again, and then kind of MN + AG, and then–
(Jesus. This was a lot of algebra.)
Point was, MANG wasn’t really MANG anymore. It was more ditching letters and adding others, ditching those and adding them back, ditching others and maybe just keeping things that way.
And it wasn’t anyone’s fault necessarily; there wasn’t anyone to blame or accuse, not this time around, which made it feel worse, as if it was just meant to be, by order of the universe, and there wasn’t anything she could do to fix it.
She’d always been told friendship groups of three were a risk. There’d always be someone left to seek someone else in partnered projects. But four? Their mere attempt of four was making three seem like the perfect number.
So, this was the situation she was now in. A group of three, plus a memory. The strings cut, tangled and knotted up, no hint at how to even go about reconnecting them.
And now she had an entire summer with nothing planned ahead of her…
She glanced at the motorcycle again, chewed her lip.
She couldn’t do it, though, could she?
Her parents had enough to deal with currently, and Marcus losing her would certainly push him further towards the edge, perhaps behind return.
She didn’t want that.
She never wanted to impact on anything.
No, it just wouldn’t be fair.
She just wanted everyone and everything to be okay. To fix what she hadn’t necessarily broken, be there, tread water through a rip current if it meant she was giving someone a chance and surviving too.
It was the firm realisation that she didn’t want to die.
She didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to give up.
She just wanted this life be a little easier. A little more secure. A little less scary. A little more liveable.
She averted her gaze from the bike, to around the garage, scanning the rooms and then back to the desk.
She didn’t want to die; she just wanted the constant noise in her head to go silent, like the world around her had become. Just for a few minutes. Maybe a few times a day. Just enough for her to be able to breathe.
She just needed to stop thinking so much.
-
“Max.”
She’d barely heard Bracia until she was right up beside her.
She’d been staring at the inside of her locker for however long she’d been staring at the inside of her locker. It was a mess. The top shelf was caving under the weight of a dozen textbooks. Numerous creased assignments, and several clothing items were stuffed beside a ring binder, whose lever was displaced from being shoved, squeezed, crushed a million times by her forcing the door shut against it.
And there was the issue of all the books in the bag at her feet, most of which she’d retrieved from the depths of her under-bed storage at closer to three o’clock this morning.
“Hey,” Bracia said. “How’s it going? I feel like I haven’t seen you since the other night.”
Max watched as a folded sheet of paper fell from top shelf, slowly floating from the left to right, then all the way down to the floor.
It floated a metre away from her, slid further upon impact onto the linoleum.
And maybe it was the fact that she’d had approximately three hours sleep that previous night, or the fact that everything was falling apart, but that singular page not cooperating almost tipped her over the edge.
Almost.
Maybe if she’d been alone, and Bracia wasn’t right there beside her, watching it too in its apparent slow motion, moving to pick it up off the floor and hand it back to her.
She forced a smile, probably a little too teethy.
“I’m good!” She replied. “Really good. Just– really, really regretting leaving this fun little job until the last day.”
“Do you need a hand?”
“No; I need to be punished for being such a hoarder and putting myself in this situation. I did this to me. I deserve to live the consequence of this.”
“Really, I don’t mind helping. I sorted my locker last week.”
Max rolled her eyes, smiled briefly to herself. “Oh, and now you’re just showboating!”
Bracia laughed, shook her head. The sound radiated down the hall; it was just them two up this side, and a couple of others down the other end attempting the same mammoth task that she was.
Here was the deal; how could such a perfectionist end up with a locker messier than someone who just straight up didn’t give a shit?
Like, Marcus’ locker had been tidier than hers – and he was hiding alcohol in there.
The thought made her heart dip, and she didn’t know if it was obvious, but then Bracia stopped closer to her, cocked her head so that she was in her immediate line of vision, all whilst Max was trying her absolute hardest to not notice her.
The hallway turned quiet again.
“Hey, Max?”
Her heart dropped at the authenticity in Bracia’s tone, figuring immediately what was happening.
Her chest tightened, her inhale as sharp as barbed wire in the back of her throat.
“Hmm?”
She hated how dry her mouth felt.
“Are you okay?”
Bracia’s voice was so soft, so caring and meaningful and filled with genuine concern and Max knew that if she turned to face her, she would burst into tears all over again.
She was so tired of crying. It felt like all she had done over the past few days.
She nodded quickly and ducked her head into her locker, took a moment to recover her voice.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just…” Bracia hesitated, took a deep breath. “You said some things the other night , and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.”
“Oh, that? It was nothing.”
“It didn’t sound very much like nothing.”
She stared at the insides of her locker, not allowing herself to flick her head into Bracia’s direction. Tried to formulate an excuse to the meltdown which seemed plausible.
(She was getting good at that.)
She took a deep breath.
“I just have a lot of family stuff going on at the moment.” She wasn’t wrong. “I don’t think my parents would really want me to talk to anyone about it. It’s kind of private, you know? We’re dealing with it, it is just… a lot. And on top of Mousse, and the end of the year, and Ginny’s trial and all…”
“I’m sorry–”
“Oh, and I broke up with Silver, too,” she added. “About ten seconds before my solo.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.”
She’d admitted all that she could hear to let out, but still she could feel Bracia’s eyes burning a hole in the side of her head, either expecting her to say more, or trying to read between the lines, or maybe just looking at her the way that she had the other night with those sad brown eyes just pleading for her to tell her the things she didn’t want to– and she didn’t need to face that right now.
“Is that everything?”
Besides the issue of Ginny leaving her on read, or Norah’s two-word text being the only thing she’d received today.
Besides that Marcus also wasn’t speaking to her, even acknowledging her, unless the situation was forced upon him by their parents, like at breakfast this morning– still, only one word responses, as he either avoided looking at her, or glared in her face.
(That could go under the ‘family issues’, thought it felt bigger than that.)
Besides that, and the other things she couldn’t stop thinking about, and the mess of her locker…
“I’ll let you know if anything else comes to mind.”
Bracia nodded, smiled, but the concern was still there– just a little faded. Still, she didn’t push. She gestured to the books in the floor.
“These need to go to the library?” Max nodded in response. “Cool. I can take them. I’m heading that direction, anyway.”
“You don’t need t–”
“It’s nothing. It can be my little good deed of the day.” She knelt down to pick up the bag from Max’s feet. “If I don’t see you before school’s out, have an amazing summer. Text me. We should hang sometime, if you’re not too busy?”
She hugged her before she went, and Max watched her leave down the hall, wondering if she was a different kind of selfish for loving Bracia and her good intentions and kindest heart, but wishing she could have been Abby or Norah or Ginny instead.
-
“Max?”
She recognised the voice immediately, because nobody else in Wellsbury sounded like that.
Georgia Miller wasn’t somebody she had been anticipating seeing today. Despite the fact that she was always out on the street, in her own front room with her mom with two glasses and a bottle of wine on the coffee table between them. Out in town at Blue Farm, and, honestly, just about everywhere in between.
In the haze of the past forty-eight hours, she’d forgotten they were neighbours.
She was still in the garage. Still at the desk. It was warmer now; the sun is a little lower in the sky, the concrete of the driveway glowing golden, creeping right up to a metre into the garage where the shadows began to take over.
Late afternoon. There wasn’t a clock in here, her phone was still there on the kitchen island. Four, probably five o’clock.
Max looked up and watched as the blonde woman stepped carefully down the sloped drive toward the open garage door, leaning against the wall, head cocked ever so slightly, and eyes sad and sympathetic.
Max knew that her face would be swollen and blotchy from crying for the main part of the past twenty-four hours. Knew her hair was an unbrushed mess, odd strands stuck to her cheeks, the remnants yesterday’s eyeliner smudged.
Georgia frowned.
“Oh, honey.”
Max brushed her hair out of her eyes, heaved a small shrug. Her lips were pursed tight in attempt to catch her from falling, and she was trying to inhale, exhale as her vision blurred, her voice caught in the back of her throat.
“I’m okay,” she managed to choke out. “Really, I–”
But Georgia just looked so sad as she stared at her, and lying about it with her when it was so obvious that she was not fine was all just one step too far. Her voice trailed off.
She couldn’t do this.
Her face crumped.
Georgia was at her side in an instant, pulling the brunette into her chest, her hand combing through her waves, gently hushing her as the teenager sobbed into her shoulder.
The notion hit just like it had at the sophomore sleepover, that very first time Georgia had allowed her to sob into her arms, probably eight months back now. But now, looking back, the cause of which seemed so stupid. Over a damn girl which she’d only had a small crush on, in retrospect.
This was her brother and his ability to live a non-destructive life that she was breaking down about now.
She inhaled shakily.
“He said that if I told, he’d never speak to me again.”
Then, she broke down even harder, painful sobs ripping from her chest, and the whole time, Georgia just held her close, silently allowing her to decide between falling apart and picking herself up, to speak if she wanted to, to stay silent if she needed that. Until, eventually, managed to stop herself from crying, and her breathing evened out.
Though Max pulled away first, bone-tired and eyes averted in embarrassment, Georgia’s hands remained firmly on her shoulder.
“Honey, look at me for a sec.”
Max settled for staring past her initially. Close enough to the real thing. But then Georgia ducked down to look at her in the eyes, too close for her to look anywhere else.
“Whatever he has said to you, need to know that you did the bravest thing that anyone could do for somebody.”
Just for a couple of seconds, Max believed her.
Later in the evening, Max found herself sat at the kitchen island on a barstool, a plate of pasta arrabbiata in front of her, the rest in her mother’s beloved Le Creuset sat upon the stovetop. Georgia was across the side of the counter.
Her dad made lasagnas for the Andersons when Bridge died. As did several other families in the town. It was a Wellsbury thing, or maybe just a white middle class American thing; foil trays of pasta bakes, rotisserie chickens and casseroles handed over thresholds when people died or got sick.
This was different.
This had been her insisting Max that she wasn’t staying in the garage for a second long than she already had, taking the little remote from the clasp of her palm into her own. Keeping an arm around her as she shut the garage door behind her, guided her into the house, and sat her down at the counter with a glass of water as she scoured the pantry.
She’d chattered away non-stop about nothing important as she’d made her dinner, obviously trying to distract her from the rest of it. She’d loaded the dishwasher afterwards, cleaned the kitchen, and then the silence resumed as she watched her push the tubes of rigatoni around her plate.
When Ellen got back, the two of them disappeared into the front room, and Max, two-thirds of a plate of pasta down, silently excused herself to bed, succumbing to sleep the moment her head hit the pillow.