Page 19 of Always Been His

It isn’t the whole truth. The truth is, I wanted to talk to Iris every single day for a year. I’ve started a thousand texts and never sent one. Hey. I miss you. I’m sorry, I’m a bad friend. Your pastries on Insta look amazing. I wish I could have one. They all sound stupid the second I type them. Iris deserves more than a text. Iris deserves me sitting on her couch with a bottle of wine, looking her in the eye and admitting that I let the version of me she grew up with get swallowed whole by the version the label built. She deserves to hear that I am sorry, I am so sorry, and I don’t know how to come back from it.

And then there is the other thing. Her older brother. My chest gets tight when I think about pulling into the Douglas family driveway. Iris lives in the big white farmhouse off Route 9, the one that is, on any given night of the week, very much occupied by Grayson as well.

I haven’t seen Grayson Douglas in two years. I don’t know what I would do if I ever saw him again, especially if he wasn’t alone. He could have someone by now, and that would break me.

“Sienna—”

“Grandma Mary!” A thick Maine accent cuts through the house, Grandma flattened into Grandmer, and I would know that voice anywhere. “I’ve been calling, but Bud said⁠—”

Iris screams at the top of her lungs, throwing her entire body into me.

“Jesus, little girl, you are going to make me deafer than what I already am.” Grandma Mary covers her ears and shakes her head at us.

“You’re here!” Iris squeals, digging her nose into the crook of my neck as she sits in my lap and hugs me tight.

She smells like cinnamon and apples, the way she has smelled since we were nine years old, since before she ever stepped foot in a real bakery, since back when the smell came from licking her fingers after helping her mother make pie. She is in a sage green yoga set, her brown hair pulled up into a bun on the top of her head, and she is warm and solid and here, and I wrap my arms around her so tight I am pretty sure I knock the wind out of both of us.

“Iris, oh my god. I’ve missed you, and I am so sorry.” I’m laughing into her shoulder and crying at the same time.

“No sorries.” She sobs into my neck. “You’re here, and I…”

She pulls back. Her hands are still on my shoulders. Her eyes go from joyful to narrowed in about half a second.

She smacks me on the shoulder. Her face twisting into a scowl. “How long have you been here?”

“A week,” I admit, wincing.

“A week?” Iris’s hands fly off my shoulders, her silver flower earrings swinging hard against her jaw. “A week, Sienna Renée! And you didn’t call me?”

“Iris—” I start.

“A whole week,” she snaps, jumping out of my lap and pacing two steps to the left and two steps back like she doesn’t know what to do with her body. “You’re supposed to be on a mental health break, and you’re hiding two miles down the road from me?”

“In my defense, the road is closer to three miles,” I mumble, picking at the loose thread on the cuff of my hoodie.

“Sienna,” she warns.

“I’m so sorry. I am the worst, I know.” I groan.

“How long are you staying?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I can stay as long as I want. Probably. We’ll see,” I sigh.

“Oh my god,” Iris breathes, shaking me by the shoulders. “We have so much to do, Sienna. We have to catch up on everything. Do you know how much I have to tell you?”

I do not. That’s the thing. I don’t know anything about her life. I don’t know if she is dating someone, if the bakery is doing okay, if her dad is having a good day or a bad day, if the house is the same as I remember it, if Grayson is the same as I remember him. I have been completely gone from her life for the last two years, and I haven’t been a good, attentive friend for eight. The last time I came home for more than a weekend, I was twenty-one years old and getting ready to drop the EP that would change everything. I had no idea, none, that the next time I sat in a kitchen with my best friend, I would be a different person inside a body I no longer recognized.

“Iris, we have so much catching up to do,” I say, gripping both of her hands in mine. “Can you come over tomorrow? Or the day after? We can have wine. I’ll cook. We can stay up all night and⁠—”

“Oh, you have plenty of time, Sienna needs a place to stay,” Grandma says, ignoring me completely and looking at Iris. “Construction starts here on Thursday on the back of the house. Bud and I leave for New Mexico on Saturday, and Sienna needs a place to stay.”

“Grandma!” I hiss.

“What’s all this hollering down here?” Bud’s voice comes down the stairs before he does. He shuffles into the kitchen in his sheepskin slippers and his soft gray pajama pants, his white hair sticking up on the right side from his afternoon nap, his reading glasses still pushed up on top of his head.

He crosses the kitchen in three long strides and presses a kiss to the top of Grandma Mary’s head, his hand resting on the small of her back as if it has lived there.

Bud came into Grandma Mary’s life the summer I was a freshman in high school, a soft-spoken widower who fixed her busted porch step. They went steady for three years, dates and small weekend trips, until one day she brought him upstairs, and he never moved out.