The Long Way Home

“You don’t have to stay,” she says again.

I nod, again. “I know.”

We’ve been having this conversation in fragments for the last hour. It keeps restarting, like neither of us quite trusts the ending.
People move around us with paper plates and careful voices. Someone laughs too loudly near the doorway and immediately apologizes to no one in particular. Grief makes everyone clumsy.

“He would’ve liked this turnout,” she says.

“He liked being seen,” I reply.

She presses her lips together. A nod. Agreement, or surrender—I can’t tell.

We stand near the kitchen counter where the drinks are sweating onto folded napkins. Condensation rings bloom and disappear, over and over, as if the surface can’t remember what just happened.

“Do you want tea?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Milk?”

“Yes.”

“Sugar?”

“No.”

She hesitates. “He took sugar.”

“I know.”

That sentence holds more than it should. We leave it alone.
While she pours the water, I study the magnet-covered refrigerator. Notes, photos, reminders written in handwriting I recognize but can’t look at for too long. The life of someone who assumed they’d have more time.

“I didn’t know,” she says suddenly, still facing the kettle.

“Know what?”

“That he swam. In Prague.”

I inhale carefully. “He didn’t.”

She turns. Her face shifts, just slightly. Confusion, then something harder.

“He said he did.”

“He liked the idea of it.”

“Oh.”

Silence again. A deeper one this time.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay.”

She hands me the tea. Our fingers brush, briefly. Human contact feels both necessary and dangerous.

“He was warm at the end,” I say, because someone should say something true.

Her shoulders drop. Not dramatically. Just enough.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

We don’t talk for a while after that. We don’t need to. The room keeps breathing around us. The world continues doing what it does best—moving forward without permission.

Eventually, someone asks if we’re okay. We nod. Eventually, someone leaves. Eventually, the crowd thins into absence.

I watch the kitchen clock tick. Each second feels deliberate, reminding me that time doesn’t care about grief or presence. The shadows of the afternoon stretch across the linoleum floor. The way the light bends reminds me that even in stillness, everything moves.

At one point, she says nothing and just sits on the windowsill, her feet dangling above the floor. She looks out at the street where a single bird hops along the curb. I notice the way her fingers rest against the glass, tracing invisible lines. I imagine the stories she’s telling herself, the ways she’s rehearsing comfort she might never say out loud.

We share a small laugh when someone knocks over a cup on the far side of the room. It’s awkward, sudden, and almost out of place—but for a second, it reminds us that the house is alive, that life continues inside these walls despite absence.

Finally, she stands. I follow instinctively. She opens the door. The cold evening air greets us, honest and sharp. I pull my coat tighter around myself. She shivers slightly, though she doesn’t admit it.

“This is how people survive each other,” she says. Not a question.

“Yes,” I answer. “I think it is.”

We step outside together. The pavement glistens faintly from an earlier rain. Streetlights cast long shadows, stretching us thinner than we feel. Cars pass, distant and indifferent. Somewhere, life moves along without pause, and somehow, that makes the staying feel less heavy.

I don’t take the most direct route home. Not because I’m lost, but because I can. Because I’m still here, still breathing, still carrying a fragment of someone else’s warmth with me. I take the long way home.

The street twists and folds into quiet corners I recognize but seldom visit. The night is neither friendly nor cruel—it is merely a witness. And walking through it slowly, I realize that this is enough. Not resolution. Not closure. Just being present, just moving forward with someone else’s shadow beside me, not behind me, not ahead of me.

And that, for now, is everything.