we keep this love in a photograph

Chapter 18

The next week was a blur. Rosie was constantly busy with work, coming home late in the evenings, worn out in her fatigues, eyes ringed with dark circles and shoulders bowed beneath the weight of guilt and sadness. Jennie tried to keep herself busy at the office, staying only as long as Rosie was at work, before coming home to soak up as much time with her as possible. Still, the days ran through her fingers like sand, slipping away to nothing as a week passed and left them with three more before she had to say goodbye.

Jennie kept her emotions on a tight leash around Rosie, quiet and thoughtful and smiling even if it was laced with sadness, but at J Corporations, she found herself irritable and short-tempered, snapping at her staff over the slightest delays or mistakes in projects. She wasn't sleeping well, up half of the night fretting over Rosie's deployment while the soldier slept beside her, slipping out of bed in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to pad downstairs to cry in the bathroom without rousing Rosie.

But she found herself gravitating towards Alice too, a small solace in the midst of so much anger and sadness. Alice was about to lose her sister, and she knew how it felt better than Jennie did, having done it multiple times before. She and Ashley became nearly permanent fixtures at Jennie's brownstone that week, the four of them having dinner together so that Rosie didn't have to split her time between her sister or her girlfriend. It made it almost ironic that those nights, sitting on the small back patio in the warmth of the summer nights while they drank pitchers of sangria and pimms and ate aglio olio or grilled clams and mussels and ears of corn as the sunset cast a golden tint over the small corner of greenery, were some of the best nights of Jennie's life.

There was an overwhelming sense of sadness growing inside Jennie, festering like a wound, as the day of the deployment grew closer with each passing day. She had always been alone, had found it comforting in its own way, the detachment from having to concern herself with other people's wants and needs and thoughts and feelings, but now, she couldn't imagine ever going back to that again. She didn't want to be alone; the highlight of her day was listening to Rosie's rambling thoughts, memorising the minute changes in her expressions and fetching fresh coffee or ordering takeout before Rosie even realised that she wanted those things. It was almost cruel that it would get torn away from her as soon as that clarifying moment had hit her.

Still, on Friday night, Jennie found herself at Alice's apartment for a change, typing away on her laptop as she waited for Rosie to come home from work. It was a cramped apartment, filled with all of Alice and Rosie's belongings, traces of Ashley scattered throughout it as well, and seeming even smaller with the three women crowded before the sofa.

After checking the financial dashboard, reading over the KPI's, data points and the quarterly revenue in regards to the annual target, Jennie got stuck into a proposal on a carbon emission free project for a hydrogen storage technology. Alice asked the occasion question about her job and her clean energy goal, Jennie launching into long-winded explanations of nuclear modular batteries she'd developed using a gas cooling method as a way to provide a heat and power source without relying on carbon emissions. Ever the scientist, Alice actively listened, something that caught Jennie off guard but was appreciated nonetheless.

She was just detailing the environmental and economic benefits of the upcoming roll-out for computers with her new clean energy batteries when the sound of a key scraping in the lock caught her attention. Her eyes dragged towards the door and a smile curled her lips as she watched Rosie push the door open. Finishing off her explanation, she watched as Rosie shuffled over the threshold, groaning and calling out a greeting. She was late.

The trio chorused their own hello's back to her, Jennie closing her laptop and Ashley looking up from a dense psychology book on PTSD. Rosie gave Jennie a tired smile as she kicked off her boots inside the door.