I SPENT MY DAY READING. Elodie was working and going straight from there to one of the other wives’ houses. Instead of worrying about her, I tried to do the things I liked to do before I met Kael. It wasn’t so long ago. That meant reading an entire poetry book, the new hipster style of poems with black covers and catchy titles. I’m a sucker for good marketing, so I ordered three more from Amazon. Every time I ordered something online I felt like I was receiving some sort of adult points for having enough money in my checking account to be able to afford it. After I scanned Amazon for too long and talked myself out of buying a pressure washer that I would most definitely never use—the one I was eyeing was called The Clean Machine—I got on Facebook. A quick scroll would clear my head. I mean, it was so much easier to focus on everyone else’s problems than my own.

I felt better—shamefully so—when I saw that Melanie Pierson was getting divorced. Melanie was in the grade above me and slept with Austin her senior year. She pretended to like me, no doubt to get closer to my brother. Until one day we were swimming and she saw the little white lines on the tops of my thighs. I hadn’t noticed them, didn’t even know what stretch marks were, until she made her hand look like a paw and called me “tiger.” Just another person who tried to boost her own poor self-image by making fun of someone else.

Melanie no doubt thought that she would escape this town by marrying a soldier, and look at her now. Coming home with her tail between her legs. She updates everyone on everything she does, so I knew that she was moving back one week to the day. Literally.

I moved on from her to my uncle who had posted pictures of rocks that look like people. Boredom and lack of motivation will do that to a man. I wondered how people would respond if I posted a broken heart emoji. Or a lengthy paragraph about my heartbreak and how it was eating me up from the inside out, and how I probably deserve to feel every bit of this agony for being so desperate for attention that I lost control of myself and my life.

I wondered if Melanie would have the same reaction to my misfortune as I had to hers. Did she see me as Austin’s bitchy sister who was always tagging along, the girl who wore a bathing suit that showed too much, things she found repulsive enough to pick at in front of everyone we knew. I wondered about Sammy too, and if she would see my post and feel bad for her best friend, or whatever we were supposed to be. We barely talked anymore, but I still considered her my best friend. At least when anyone asked. Not that anyone did. A habit, I guess.

I closed out of Facebook before I could follow through with my social experiment. I moved on to the porch. It was the perfect temperature outside, warm enough not to have to wear a jacket, but not too warm as to be hot and sticky. I took the poetry book and a beer that Kael left in my fridge and spent the next hour outside in the fresh air. I had one drink of the dark amber beer and all I could taste was Kael.

He was everywhere. He had become everything. I turned the pages in my book and felt like every single poem was read in Kael’s voice, I skipped from page to page.

Your skin is dark

As the velvet night

Your starred eyes

Are tenants in the constellations

I closed the book and tossed it, watching as it went skidding across the porch. The Chaos of Longing is exactly what I felt and I wanted the collection as far away from me as they could get. I kicked the little pink book and watched as it disappeared into the patch of weeds next to my porch.

Then I felt guilty. It wasn’t the poet’s fault that my first love only lasted a week. I crawled over to grab it and dug my hand into the stringy weeds. They were too long, too unmanageable, growing into unpredictable vegetation overgrowing my yard. This little house was the only thing that wasn’t going to turn out to be something that it wasn’t. I knew what I was getting when I signed the dotted line for the basically abandoned house at the end of a strip mall covered street. The house was exactly what I knew it was. Sure, it was falling apart and unkempt, but that’s what I had signed up for. I was working my way back to making it beautiful. My house. For me. And yet, it had become another thing that reminded me of Kael. I began to pull at the weeds in the yard. I needed a distraction and had the rest of the day to do as I pleased, as long as Mali didn’t drive past my house and see me out here yanking the weeds from the yard. Minutes went by and I moved on from the weeds to sweep the gravel back into my driveway. It had started to take over my yard.

I thought about Kael and his remodel plans for his duplex. He had a talent for home design and I hated that he told me I should pave my driveway and now every time I see the gray stone gravel, I’m would think about him.

Don’t even think about that, I told myself. Possibly out loud, but at that point I couldn’t be sure. Don’t let him make you turn on this house. It’s all you have.