&then.
*eight days in, has spent three nights at Carol's and five nights with Doc, though the days are pretty well split between the two* *feels busy for the first time in what seems like forever, the empty spaces filled with cooking and gabbing and his usual handyman-ing around his aunt's house (up to and including pulling up the wood floor in the kitchen and laying down tiles—anything to erase the (invisible) blood in the grain)*
*loiters at Doc's kitchen table late in the afternoon, socked feet kicked up on a chair, thoroughly engrossed in a book he liberated from the shelves in the front room* *one of hisbooks, actually, but they're pretty much a fixture here now*