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help,” Elaina says. “Just tell us what to do. Do you want to split up the rooms? Or do you want everyone to go from room to room together?”
    “Together, I think.”
    “Good.” She pauses. “Which room should we start in?”
    I feel glued to the couch. I think Elaina senses this. So she’s prodding. She’s making me move, telling me to
stand up,
to get into motion. I find it irritating and then feel guilty for
being
irritated, because I’ve never been irritated with Elaina before and she doesn’t deserve it now.
    I stand in a single motion. Like jumping off the high board without thinking about it first. “Let’s start in my bedroom.”

    We put a bunch of boxes together, a startling cacophony of ripping tape and scraping cardboard. Now it’s silent again. Matt and I each had our own closet in the master bedroom. I’m looking at the door to his closet and the air is getting heavy.
    “Oh for God’s sake,” Callie says. “It is just
too
damn serious in here.”
    She stalks over to the windows and yanks open the plantation shutters on one, then another, then the last. Sunlight comes rushing into the room, a flood of gold. She opens the windows in decisive, almost savage, motions. It takes a moment before a cool breeze begins to eddy, followed by the sounds of the
out there
.
    “Wait here,” she growls, heading toward the door of the bedroom.
    Elaina raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug. We hear Callie tromp down the stairs, followed by some sounds from the kitchen, and now she’s tromping back up to the bedroom. She enters holding a small boom box and a CD. She plugs in the boom box, puts in the CD, and hits play. A driving drumbeat begins, mixing with an electric guitar riff that is catchy and a little familiar. This is one of
those
songs: I can’t name it, I’ve heard it a thousand times, it always gets my foot tapping.
    “
Hits of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties
,” she says. “It won’t deliver on
substance,
but it’ll deliver on
fun.
”
    Callie has transformed the room in the space of three minutes. It has gone from shadowed and somber to bright and frivolous. Just another bedroom on a beautiful day. I think about what she said earlier, about her inability to commit, and realize that avoiding the serious in her personal life has had at least one good side effect: She knows how to have fun at the drop of a hat.
    I look down at Bonnie, raise my eyebrows. “Think we can boogie our way through this, babe?” I ask.
    She grins at me and nods.
    “Yeah,” I reply back. I take a breath, walk over to the closet, and open the door.

6
    THE MUSIC AND SUNLIGHT WORKED, AT LEAST IN MY BEDROOM. We went through Matt’s closet without me feeling too sad.
    We packed away his shirts and slacks, his sweaters and shoes. The smell of him was everywhere, and the ghost of him. It seemed like I had a memory for every piece of clothing. He’d smiled wearing this tie. He’d cried at his grandfather’s funeral in this suit. Alexa had left a jam handprint on this shirt. These memories seemed less painful than I had expected. More rich than depressing.
    Doing good, babe,
I’d heard Matt say in my head.
    I didn’t reply, but I had smiled to myself.
    I thought about Quantico and that possibility too. Maybe it would be good to leave this place behind.
    If I do, it needs to be about choice, not retreat. I need to embrace my ghosts and lay them down, because they’ll follow me wherever I go. That’s what ghosts do.
    We got through the closet and the bedroom and then the bathroom, and I floated through it all, the pain there but tolerable.
Bittersweet, waitress, heavy on the sweet
.
    We filed down the stairway together with the boxes, moved into the garage, then up into the attic above the garage, dropping them off and pushing them back into corners where I knew they’d sit in the dark and gather dust.
    Sorry, Matt,
I thought.
    They’re just things, babe,
he replied.
The heart doesn’t get dusty
.
    I guess.
    By