Page 29 of Until You

And that was it.

So no, Oliver and I are not avoiding each other, exactly. We’re just... orbiting. Two planets in the same solar system that happen to rotate on completely different schedules. He exists in the early morning dark and the late-night quiet. I exist in the bright hours in between, when the house is mine and the silence is the manageable kind.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

What isn’t fine is the box I found in the hall closet on my third day alone.

I’d been looking for extra shelf paper for the pantry—because Pops’ height-based organizational system was still haunting me—and instead I pulled down a large cardboard box labeled, in Mimz’s looping handwriting:

Wedding & Honeymoon—DO NOT THROW AWAY, TOMMY.

Tommy, well Thomas, being Pops’ actual name, which I’d only recently learned because everyone, including his own children, apparently call him Pops.

I’d carried the box to the kitchen table and opened it.

And then I’d sat there for an hour and a half.

Photographs. Hundreds of them. Not digital, not backed up, not organized—just loose prints and old envelopes stuffed with negatives and a few curling Polaroids with dates scrawled on the white borders in fading ink. Mimz and Pops on their wedding day, 1970. Her in a simple dress with daisies in her hair, him in a suit that was slightly too big in the shoulders, both of them looking at each other like the photographer didn’t exist.

Mimz and Pops on their honeymoon. A road trip, it looked like. Her leaning against the hood of a car with mountains behind her. Him holding up a fish the size of his forearm with a grin I recognized—the same grin Pops still gives when he thinks he’s being charming. Mimz asleep in the passenger seat with her shoes off and her feet on the dash.

Mimz and Pops at what looked like their first apartment. Tiny kitchen. Ugly wallpaper. Her standing at the stove, looking over her shoulder at whoever was taking the picture—him, obviously—with an expression of such plain, uncomplicated love that I had to put the photo down and press my fingers against my eyes.

Because here’s the thing about growing up the way I did. You learn early that love is conditional. That it has limits, and expiration dates, and fine print. That people leave, or get taken, or simply stop showing up, and the only constant in your life is the next placement, the next bed, the next stranger telling you this is home now in a voice that means this is temporary.

But these photos. This box. This entire, imperfect, unorganized collection of two people loving each other across fifty-plus years⁠—

There’s nothing about it that’s temporary.

In fact, it’s the opposite of temporary.

And something about that cracks me open in a way I’m prepared for.

So I do what I always do when I don’t know how to sit with a feeling. I turn it into a project.

Their wedding anniversary party is in two days. I know this because Mimz has a calendar on the kitchen wall with every family birthday, anniversary, and “important Blankenship date” marked in different colored ink.

Their anniversary is circled in red with three exclamation points and the note: 50 years!

I also know because their daughter-in-law, Rebecca, who is also Oliver’s mother, has called me twice to have me look for things in the house for the party. She’s beyond lovely. Warm and friendly in a way I thought people only faked.

A slideshow. That’s what I decided to make. A digital slideshow of their life together. Scanned photos, set to music, organized by decade. Something they can play at whatever celebration the family puts together. Something that says your love story matters in a way that doesn’t require me to say it out loud, because I don’t think I could get those words past my throat without breaking.

I set up a scanning station at the kitchen table. Mimz’s old flatbed scanner that I found in the office closet, my laptop, and a system of labeled folders. I work on it during the daytime hours, carefully lifting each photo, placing it face-down on the glass, watching the bar of light sweep across and pull the image into digital permanence.

It’s meditative. Quiet. The kind of work that lets your hands stay busy while your mind does whatever it needs to do.

What my mind needs to do, apparently, is think about Oliver.

And the thing I haven’t told him.

The thing that’s growing inside me, lime-sized and insistent, making its presence known every morning between five and seven with a vengeance that borders on theatrical.

I should tell him.

I know I should tell him.