What We Carry Home

The **cat** was dead when Elena returned, though she'd left instructions with Marcus to feed it twice daily. The smell hit her first—that sickening sweetness of decay wrapped in the familiar lavender of her mother's detergent. She found it behind the dryer, a matted calico thing that had been her companion through the divorce, through her mother's decline, through the long nights when insomnia felt like the only honest thing left in her life.

Marcus sat at the kitchen table, not looking up from his phone. He was thin now—the kind of thin that suggested he'd stopped caring somewhere along the way, though his clothes were still expensive, still pressed.

"You forgot her," she said. "Her name was Willow."

"I didn't forget." Marcus's voice was flat. "I just didn't think it mattered. She was old, Elena. It was time."

The silence stretched between them like something you could choke on. This was the same man who'd held her while she cried over her mother's diagnosis, who'd promised to care for the house, the animals, the life she'd left behind when she took the promotion in Chicago. The same man who'd sent her texts about the **dog** they'd adopted together—a golden retriever named **Bull** because he'd barrel through rooms like he owned every inch of space, knocking things over with an enthusiasm that bordered on violence. Bull was gone now too. "Old age," Marcus had written. "Peaceful."

Elena walked through the house, touching nothing. The dust was thick enough to write in. In the bedroom, she found it: the letter she'd written three years ago, folded and refolded, the creases wearing through the paper. She'd called him her **friend** then, when friendship was all she could offer. When the distance between two people felt geographical rather than emotional. When she'd believed that love could be compartmentalized, filed away like tax returns, retrieved only when necessary.

She found him on the back porch, smoking. The **bull**—the actual one, the stuffed head her father had shot in Montana when Elena was seven—watched from above the sliding glass door. Its glass eyes caught the dying light, seemed to know something she didn't.

"I met someone," Marcus said. The smoke curled around his face. "She's staying here sometimes."

Elena nodded. She thought about Willow decomposing behind the dryer. About Bull's enthusiasm, how he'd never met a stranger. About friendship, how it rots when neglected, how it becomes something unrecognizable. About how she'd left this house thinking she could return to it unchanged, how some part of her had believed that life would pause like a held breath until she was ready to exhale again.

"You should have told me," she said.

"I know."

The sun was setting now, painting the sky in bruises of purple and red. Somewhere a dog barked—real, enthusiastic, alive. Elena thought about the boxes packed in her car, the promotion waiting in Chicago, the life she'd built without this house, without these memories, without the weight of something that had stopped being hers years ago.

"I'm not staying," she said. "I came back to sell."

Marcus nodded, stubbing out his cigarette. The bull's glass eyes seemed to approve.