1. A letter.

By the time Analise had finally left him, Aulcott had already started to push away the people around him. Hell, he had started going out of his way to avoid people, staying in his office and keeping the lights in the house off, just so that no one would think anyone was home. The Panchenko's had come around 7 times already just to try and discuss the divorce papers, always giving up after anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour, the constant knocking and yelling of 'I know you're in there!' having poor effects on his studying.

The first time he leaves the house, it's to retrieve the mail. He spends an hour peeking between the blinds in the living room before he decides that:

A: No one is going to kill him in the minute it will take him to walk down the driveway, open the mailbox, take the mail out, sprint back to the door, and slam it shut.

B: Dianna and Dmitro aren't in their car right around the corner waiting to pounce like they're engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Probably.

C: Analise isn't going to fantastically appear in his (their) driveway, saying that she realizes how important his work is, how much she misses him and that the separation was a bad decision, how she won't move to the other side of Canada and that she just wants him to be happy.

That last part isn't something he's really genuinely afraid of, just something he had reason to be genuinely afraid of.

He adjusts the tie of his robe around his waist and holds his breath as he opens the door and shoots down the driveway, or at least tries to before there's a hard hit in a line around his waist, the loop of his robe getting caught on the door handle and knocking the wind out of him, leaving him to stop and untie himself from the door, crumbling to the porch as he tries to catch his breath. Tears come to his eyes far easier than they should, and he swallows the knot as it bobs in his throat before getting up and walking down the driveway leisurely, like a normal person. If someone were to see him just walking or driving by, they wouldn't even think 'gosh, that guy looks so normal' because that's how normal he looks, he's completely unremarkable. He isn't crying silently or holding his abdomen like he's been shot. He even makes it to the mailbox, though he is very scathed both emotionally and physically.

He opens the mailbox, fanagalling with it when it gets stuck like it always does. He barely had touched this mailbox in the past five years, the mail always appearing in a neat pile on the dining table, sorted into personal, work, and bills. Aulcott begins to think that maybe you are always ungrateful for the people around you until they're no longer there. The mail is roughly grabbed, the envelopes getting folded, torn, and crumpled slightly in the process. He reaches into the back, making sure he has all the mail and finds a cardboard box crudely shoved in. He tucks the envelopes under his arm, muttering to himself about how he struggles because God hates him.

After wrestling with the mailbox for five minutes, checking around his shoulder to make sure the Panchenko's weren't here to make their weekly visit, he finally gets the box out. He checks the address to find it's from Analise. He carries it inside, forgetting the rest of his mail on the sidewalk, which he promptly realizes and power-walks back outside to retrieve it.

The box is set down on the table, notably not where the mail would usually be, but rather in front of the chair she would always sit at when he did show up to eat dinner here instead of his study. The horrible anxious nagging in the back of his mind isn't allowed to get through him while he powers through, digging through his desk drawer for a pocket knife, a letter opener, anything sharp really. When something is finally found, he runs back to the dining room, being careful not to get caught on any other doors or slip and trip from wearing socks on wooden floors (which has been a very common occurrence over the years.) He opens the box, and sees neatly folded clothing and a couple items rolled up in bubble wrap, with a pink envelope on top, complete with his name written in a darker pink pen.

He just sits for a moment.

He sits and lets himself wonder what would be so bad about not opening it. He won't have to deal with whatever she's said, if he just doesn't open the letter. But that isn't how Aulcott Averies does things and it never has been. He delicately picks the envelope up, using the letter opener he had found to open it neatly, just in case he needs to preserve it. For legal reasons and nothing else. He could break down at the smell of her perfume as he takes the letter out of the envelope.

She always liked to personalize things, leave some sort of message saying 'this is undoubtedly me! Just me and nobody else!' in any way possible. Between the envelope, letter, and writing in all different shades of pink, to the scent of her perfume that she sprayed on the paper before writing to him, undoubtedly her and undoubtedly able to rip him to pieces with no one to tape him back together if he let it.

The letter speaks of how she accidentally took some of his things in the move, just wanting to return them in case he was missing them. He barely reads most of it, skimming through to leave it to be read in detail at a different, later time. The end of the letter is focused heavily on.

'From the desk of Analise Averies'

And nothing more, nothing less. An emotional war between the preservation of his last name and the lack of an affection in the close.

He lets himself break down in the poorly lit dining room, shoulders jerking back and forth with the force of it all. The letter and envelope are carefully moved to a different part of the table, as to not get tears on them. He unpacks the box, pulling out two skirts and a blouse of his, a mug proclaiming that 'Real men marry paranormal investigators!', two small jewelry dishes, and a large manilla envelope of papers that he hadn't been able to see at surface level. It scares him until he looks at the labeling to see that it's just papers filed under 'K', the ones he’d been looking for for weeks.

The blouse still smells like her as he cries into it, letting go while nobody's watching.

2. A photo.

While unpacking her belongings into the house she'd purchased with cash in hand, Analise tried extremely hard not to think about what she was doing. Not because she would be particularly sad, no, not that at all. It was so that the bitter feeling that made the acid in her stomach start to travel back up and make a pool of bile in the back of her throat, disgusting and thick. The knot in her stomach gets tighter with every box she unpacks, like she's almost waiting for everything to be in its place here to lose her mind and trash it all.

She tries to relax her jaw as she walks back to the rented trailer, breathing deeply before lifting it up, shifting it a couple feet, and then leaving it on the driveway as she closes the door to the trailer again. Taking it into her arms, she walks back to the door feeling like a rubber band pulled too taut. The door is slammed shut with her foot as she looks at what the box is labeled and takes it into the kitchen. Since the boxes are the same ones Aulcott used when he moved in with her, his handwriting is scrawled across the side, saying that this box contains 'Plates? OR cake pans'

She huffs her breath, rolling her eyes. She had had enough plates for a small army before he had moved in, let alone after. But that was just what Aulcott did. He saw the places in your life that were fully satisfied, and made them spill over, all while ignoring the parts of it that were depleted. All he knew how to provide was what was already there.

Analise pats her back pockets, then her front pockets, before finding her retractable razor blade and sliding it quickly through the packing tape, away from herself.

Instead of plates (OR cake pans), though, there were photo albums. Photo albums she didn't even remember packing. They must have been from the handful of boxes that she had grabbed, already stuffed full, from the back of their hall closet. Her hall closet. There was nothing left to share between them. No more "theirs" or "ours". Just "hers" and "his".

A clear wall in the middle of something that used to just be a fact of her life. One that she accepted begrudgingly, but somehow would be letting go of with more hesitance.

She takes the top album out, trying to rub the dust off of it, but only getting it to pill on the cover. Opening it revealed her and Aulcott's wedding photos. She had worn a wedding dress purchased from the thrift store, and he had bought a suit. She was a broke college student, and he had inheritance money.

Not once in her life had the thought of sharing herself with someone ever occurred to her, until Aulcott came tumbling into her life, taking her space and making it theirs, taking her days and making it their days. Living a life as just the one is going to be hard, she knew that from the second she saw Aulcott going downhill.

She flipped the pages quickly, trying to swallow down that awful knotted bile that came back up her throat ten times as easily as it got pushed down. Next came a lot of photos of her studying. Photos of what were once friends, but were now lawyers who had, while staying civil, clearly not taken her side in all of it.

Dancing together, in their kitchen. Something that had clearly been taken by someone else (Dmitro Panchenko). In the horrible yellow light, after a dinner made for friends. She can almost see herself swaying on the page, three glasses of wine coursing through her veins comfortably and warm while she cradled Aulcott in her arms, hugging him tightly and doing nothing more than spinning around in a circle.

She could hear the cicadas outside of their house, incessant noise that he had always complained about at night, saying he was unable to sleep, or on afternoons he'd gotten a migraine from neglecting to wear his glasses.