I resisted for almost an hour, but I’d already lost. They were right; the way I looked now, establishing a new identity on my own would be impossible. And as low as it made me feel, I didn’t think I could be on my own right now. My emotions were swinging between determined and hopeless, far worse than what I’d gone through last year with my life on the line. One moment I knew I’d make it through this like I’d made it through everything else, the next I would remember everything I had to face and had to do, and when I did it felt like hitting a wall and splattering off it like an egg, nothing to put back together. I sat and hugged myself, trying not to fly apart.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Come with us if you want to live,” Carl joked, forcing a laugh out of me. May rolled her eyes and stood, taking my hand and pulling me up and into a hug. I’d gotten a few of those last year, but this felt completely different. Then I’d been taller, much bigger than May even after my weight loss; now I was smaller than her by at least a few inches and she enveloped me.

  “You’re going to be fine, sweetie,” she whispered in my ear with all the confidence I didn’t have and an extra hard squeeze before turning me to the door. “You come on over right now, you can babysit Steph while I run some errands. There’s already a mattress and frame upstairs for the front guest room, we just never put it together and Carl can work on that while you make the baby smile.”

  I relaxed, just a little bit. That I could do.

  We trooped across our backyards, away from eyes on the street. Their townhouse—the middle house of the four-floor townhouse triplex that was the Ross, Seever, and Thompson homes—was the same layout as mine, and just as old. I’d grown up on this street before moving out and then moving back in when Father passed. Carl and May had been doing some remodeling of their own, but the ground floor rooms hadn’t changed and I crashed in the living room while May went upstairs to get Steph and bring her down to put in her downstairs crib. The little flesh-lump, almost a year old now, barely woke from her nap in the move, just fussing a little and settling back down again where I could watch her.

  With no siblings and never marrying, I’d had zero experience with kids let alone infants before Steph came along, and in the beginning I’d handled her like glass. May, with her experience with younger cousins, had laughed at both Carl and me. Now Carl just satisfied himself that she was back asleep and then trooped upstairs himself. “You’re going to be okay?” May asked.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, feeling like I could use a nap myself. Panicking for an hour straight took a lot out of me. Then I felt something south of my stomach and panicked again. “Wait!”

  “What is it, hun?”

  Oh, God. I was wide eyed and blushing hotly again, squeezing my legs together. “I’ve got to pee!”

  May blinked and laughed. “And? A lot’s changed but you use the same muscles for that.” Then she got a thoughtful look. “Wait, there is something more. Come on, let’s get you potty-trained.” Taking my hand again, she led me back down the hall to the ground floor half-bath, a tiny room off the hall with just a toilet and sink that smelled of floral potpourri, and pushed me in. “You know what to do but stay on the pot and call out when you’re done.” She shut the door.

  I stared at the toilet like it had become my personal enemy. Okay. Okay. You can do this. Breathing deep, I turned around and dropped my sweats to my ankles. Pulling up my t-shirt, I sat without looking down. Not having to adjust anything felt deeply strange and I fixed my eyes on the door and tried to relax and relax. Eventually it came, filling the little room with a tinkling sound. Even this felt weird, the release of pressure somehow different. Finally feeling empty, I cleared my throat. “I’m done.”

  May gave a perfunctory knock and opened the door. “Right,” she said, stepping inside. “Did you poop, too?”

  I reflexively pulled my shirt down over my lap. “No!”

  “That’s fine, this lesson still works.” Reaching down beside me, she pulled a couple of sheets of toilet paper off the roll, folded them, and presented them to me. “Rule number one of feminine hygiene is to wipe your puss and your ass separately. Now reach down there and wipe front to back, only your puss. Gently but give it some pressure, then drop the paper in the bowl.”

  I closed my eyes and followed her instructions, wincing at the feel of friction on parts I’d never felt before.

  “Okay,” she said when I looked up. “You’ll do that every time. When you poop too, you wipe in front first, just your lady bits and just like that, then get more paper and wipe in back, always going front to back. The goal is to keep any bacteria from your poop away from your lady bits where it can cause bacterial infections. Understand?”

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  When I nodded, she ruffled my hair. “Good. Now wash up and come on out.” Stepping back out she closed the door, restoring my privacy.

  I let out a shaky breath and stood, pulling up my sweats and washing my hands at the sink for a good thirty seconds before leaving the bathroom, feeling ridiculous over my panic. She greeted me in the kitchen with a water bottle. “Hydrate, it’s been a long morning. Now you’ll be okay with Steph until I get back? I’ll be a couple of hours.”

  “Carl can feed her when she wakes up? Yeah, I can do it.”

  “Wonderful.” Grabbing her purse she dropped a passing kiss on my cheek, making me blink, and was gone. I touched the spot as she closed the door, back to trying to think again. (About something besides me; there I didn’t want to think at all.)

  I rubbed my cheek. I’d always been . . . attracted to my young and lovely neighbor. Who wouldn’t be? At thirty-two she ran and did gym and was vibrant with youth and health and a determined sort of happiness. Carl just sort of followed along in her cheerful wake. Not that he was whipped or anything, just that he loved how she was and didn’t want to change a thing. He made most of the money with his cyber-security firm and she brought in some more with her home-based accounting practice, and she made most of the plans. Like the remodeling, half of which she did with her own hands. They were a team.

  And I knew she’d caught my male appreciation a time or two—and had let me know, without saying anything, that she appreciated being physically appreciated but that was all. Even during my recovery from heart surgery, rare supportive hugs aside (something I definitely hadn’t been used to getting from young and attractive women), she hadn’t acted anything like this. Sitting on the couch and staring at Steph sleeping in her crib, I bit a nail and ruminated.

  They’d had family in town a few times and I’d been invited to share their dinner once or twice and seen her give touch-affection to every one of her visiting cousins, some of them much younger. An only child like me, she said she’d been surrounded by extended family growing up, and she really was treating me like a younger relative already. Seeing me so freaked out and lost this morning, she’d just slipped into that mode.

  So, a younger cousin? I could live with that. I didn’t have any family left, nobody who’d wonder where I’d disappeared off to. I had neighbors I’d gotten to know better in the last two years thanks to Carl and May, but few of my childhood neighbors had still been here when I’d moved back in and I hadn’t tried hard to get to know the new ones. They’d ask questions when I “moved to Tahiti” without telling anyone but the Seevers first. But they’d be asking Carl and May.

  The idea of reliving even a year of high school filled me with dread, but . . . This could work. This could really work.

  **************************************

  When Steph woke an hour later, I checked that she was dry and gave her her pacifier and then hiked upstairs, still feeling too off-balance to trust myself to carry her up with me. Finding Carl on the third floor in the front bedroom where he’d moved all the boxes out and was assembling the bed, I self-consciously knocked on the doorframe. “Baby’s awake.”

  Every word I spoke sounded weird in my ears, high and soft, but my voice wasn’t shaky anymore. That was something, anyway. Carl looked up. “I’ll be right down. How are you doing, old man?”

  “I live.” That had been my go-to answer last year when I feel like shit and want to close my eyes and die, had been what I’d really wanted to say.

  “That bad, huh?” He grimaced. “This really is shit, isn’t it?” Even with everything I found myself grinning. May might be treating me differently but Carl was still Carl. I was willing to bet that when Steph got older he’d be relating to her with light shoulder-punches and “Buck up, sport.”

  “Yeah, it’s shit.”

  “Language, you’re a young lady now.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He laughed. “Don’t make me get the soap.”

  Snickering, I stepped back from the door and followed him downstairs where, grabbing up his offspring and assessing her stink level himself, he proceeded to the kitchen where he one-handed the process of getting out and warming her formula with her lying like a limp blanket against his shoulder. She burbled at me over his back.

  “Yeah, kid,” I said. “Live it up, it’s not going to get any easier than this.” But I was still smiling. She smiled back. It was probably gas.

  “You know,” Carl said, talking as he worked. “We should pack up some of your stuff over there. Your computer comes here, we’ll get a study desk for your room. We can box your clothes, close everything up and hire a cleaning service to come in once a week or so to dust, make it look like you’re far, far away. Or you could rent the place out, be a distant landlord, even turn it into an Airbnb rental. Since you’re obviously going to outlive your retirement accounts now.

  The way he said it, so casually, stole my breath. He and May had said they wanted this, but I knew their plan to fill this house over the next few years—May wanted more babies, soon so Steph would have brothers and sisters close to her age—and here they were casually moving me in on top of them like it was the most natural thing to do in the circumstances. Like I was family.

  My throat closed up again. Dammit. “Carl?” I said, swallowing the lump. “Thank you.”

  “Hey, you’d do the same if . . . Actually, I can’t imagine a circumstance anything like this. But you would.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to make more words. “Yeah,” I finally got out.

  He nodded back and proceeded to feed the little sprout, neither of us saying anything. I leaned against the counter—which felt too high like everything did now—and tried to recover my mental equilibrium. I felt like a spinning gyroscope—one moment humming along steadily, then pushed off into a spin until I came back to center again. Calm settled in, sort of, and I tried to stay in it. I was pretty sure I’d be back on the spinning ride when May came back with whatever she’d gone for. There’d be fresh hell soon enough.

  I couldn’t have been more right.