Page 27 of Feels Like Coming Home

The next day,Piper and I were sitting at my dining room table discussing the She Who Thrives Live! conference and everything that needed to get done between now and April. Because of the time I took off after losing Connor, we were woefully behind on planning and scheduling. Piper had asked if I wanted to cancel it this year, but I told her that would be a disaster and I would be fine. While that still wasn’t necessarily true with only four months left before the conference, I was doing better than I had been six months ago.

“Okay, so we have the catering, serving materials, and waitstaff all through the convention center. Hosting it there also means we have lighting, audio, and video taken care of too.” Piper was writing things down on a notepad, as she always insisted on doing, which sat on top of the MacBook Pro I bought for her last year. I stopped trying to understand why she had a thing for writing things down when she could just type them up.

“How are we doing on ticket sales?” I asked as I opened up a new window on my laptop.

“Uhhh…” I didn’t look up from my screen but could hear the papers that were strewn on top of the table being shuffled around and knew she was looking for the piece of paper she’d written the number down on.

“Pipe—”

“Here it is!” she cut me off and gave me a sly grin before I could get on her about using her goddamn laptop. “I checked before our meeting and we are at 325 total ticket sales, which is great seeing as how we have four months left to get butts into those last 75 seats.” She looked up at me and smiled, her grin telling me to leave her alone about her papers.

“Amazing, and we haven’t even announced the full panel of speakers yet which will bring in those people. I’m glad we bumped the numbers up this year like we discussed.” My eyes were back on my laptop, typing something into the search bar.

“Yeah, for sure. I think if we hit 400 this year, we can waitlist the rest of the people who want tickets and then give them early access to next year's event to encourage them to try and purchase again.” Piper continued talking but my mind had drifted to focus on the results of my Google search.

Beach homes for rent near me.

After meeting with Deborah yesterday, I couldn’t get her suggestion out of my head.You should work on getting out more, she had offered, or some variation of that.It’s not your house that’s suffocating you, it’s grief.

It sure as shit felt like it was my house, and coming home from our session yesterday had felt no different. Even now, sitting here with Piper, I could sense what felt like two hands around my throat, threatening to squeeze a little too hard. I hadn’t considered leaving until Deborah suggested it, but now that the idea was there, I didn’t hate it.

Actually, I really kind of loved it.

“With 400 chairs, we could arrange the room in a sort of?—”

“We should go on a trip,” I interrupted Piper, still not looking up from my computer.

“We should take a trip?” Her voice came out slowly, obviously confused as to where this idea came from.

“Yeah, you and me. We should take a trip.” I looked up at Piper finally to find she was looking back at me with furrowed brows.

Piper set her pen down on top of her notepad, laced her fingers together, and looked at me. “Okay…where would you like to go?”

“We could go to the beach.”

“The beach? YOU wanna go to the beach?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Yeah, that’s what I just said. The beach.”

Piper exhaled deeply and unlaced her fingers, placing them flat on top of her notepad.

“Haley, youhatethe beach. You always have, which is why you live in the city and not on the water. Not that I don’t love the fact that you want to get out, because I think a trip would be really good for you…but where is this coming from?”

I took a deep breath, knowing I owed my best friend an explanation for my sudden need to get the hell out of my house.

“Deborah suggested that I get out of the house more often, and the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea.” I shrugged and looked at my friend who was watching with a disconcerting look.

“Since we’re so close to the conference, we could use it as a business trip. We could rent a house for a few months, use it to plan and get new ideas for the event, and then come home and host it. Think of it like an extended work trip.”

“This would be awork trip? Nothing else…?” She dropped her chin and pushed her eyebrows together as she looked at me from across the table. If she had glasses on, she would be looking at me over them like the cranky old lady does in the movies.

“I mean…” I paused and considered telling her the whole truth. I thought back to something Deborah had said before in a session about not having to carry the weight of my grief alone. Piper is my best friend, more like my sister, so I decided I could give her the whole truth.

I took another breath. “I also just need to get out of this house. I know I should be over it by now, but it’s still so hard being here alone all the time. I don’t know if you know this, but I still can’t sleep in our—my—bed. I sometimes feel like I'm suffocating just being here.” Too embarrassed to look Piper in the eye, I settled on staring at the pen she had been using to write notes.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” She reached over and took both my hands in hers, “I didn’t know you were feeling like that. I knew you were still struggling, which anyone who went through what you did would be, but I didn’t realize how hard it was to be here. But, just for the sake of being honest, I did know about the sleeping thing. Martha told me about what happened after the funeral and asked that I check to see if it looked like you were still sleeping in the guest room.”

I scoffed and rolled my eyes. I should have known that my mom would have a spy on me. She always did, telling me when I was growing up that she had eyes everywhere and would know if I ever misbehaved when she wasn’t around. I knew that this time though, her spy was only looking out for me, and I had a deeper love and appreciation for both her and my best friend.

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