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It's two AM when Nigel knocks on her door.
He looks good, for having been dead for a year. No bullet hole in the forehead or even a scar.
Gabi briefly considers that she might have finally snapped, but then her fist makes contact with his nose and there is the solid crack of cartilage under her knuckles, and between his soft grunt of pain and the blood that follows, staining her fist, there is no mistaking him for a hallucination. His arms, when they curl around her in a hug, pinning her hands down to her sides lest she try to punch him out again, are solid and three-dimensional, and his warmth bleeds through his ugly blue floral shirt and into her bones, his breathing pained from his likely-broken nose but real.
He is alive and breathing and he pulls Gabi into his chest, ignoring his nose and her harsh shaking sobs against his skin. He smells like menthol cigarettes, the metallic tinge of blood, cheap motel bar soap, like her father used to, like safety and security and comfort and maybe even a bit like love.
He's alive.
Nigel eases her into the apartment, and closes the door with a kick of his foot so that he doesn't have to let go of her.
She's still shaking against him. She can't decide if she is pissed off or sad or overwhelmingly happy, but then Gabi looks up at him and she's lost all over again. There's a broken sort of gentleness in his expression as he runs a fingertip along her cheek. An old wounded dog come back from war to its master, almost. Tired of fighting, maybe.
"Hello, beautiful," he says quietly, smiling gently.
She tries to smile back, but it's more an uneven grimace than a proper smile.
"Hello, Nigel."
He's still sleeping on her couch when she wakes up, tip-toeing out in her slippers and one of his old ugly button-ups she'd confiscated to sleep in as part of grieving him, back when she'd thought he was dead.
His chest rises and falls steadily his breathing. He twitches slightly in his sleep. He even snores a little occasionally.
Nigel is undeniably alive and sleeping on her couch.
Gabi isn't sure how she feels about it, really.
He was supposed to have been dead. She'd seen the bullet wound and the blood. She'd seen his corpse. She'd been the lone attendee at his funeral and been the only one to put flowers on his grave. She'd laid curled up beside his headstone until the granite was warm from her body heat and cried until all she had left were dry sobs that shook her whole body. She'd slept in his shirts and refused to wash his pillowcase, left his half-finished pack of menthols sitting on the kitchen table where he'd left them. Kept the grocery list in his handwriting on the counter, his cologne on the edge of the sink.
She had grieved and mourned, denied and bartered and pleaded and cried until she finally, finally was able to look at their photos together without breaking down.
And now he was back, and alive, and sleeping on her tiny floral couch, like nothing had ever happened and his brains hadn't ever been blown out.
Four months ago―hell, maybe even just three―Gabi would have seen it as the miracle she'd been praying for.
But now, she wasn't so sure.
She'd healed. She'd recovered. She had accepted that Nigel was dead and gone and never coming back.
Watching him sleep felt like going backwards in time, undoing all the stitches she'd done to pick herself back up in his aftermath.
He stirs restlessly, and Gabi straightens her posture and goes to make a pot of coffee.
The silence hanging between them during breakfast is heavy and tense, threatening to stifle them both.
He smokes two cigarettes in thirty minutes and she drinks three cups of black coffee. Her attempts at pancakes are mostly palatable at best and slightly burnt at worst―he was always the better cook―but Nigel doesn't comment, just drowns them in syrup.
He breaks the silence when he extinguishes his last cigarette in the battered plastic ashtray on the table, which was exactly where he'd left it one year ago.
"I thought it was for the best, if I went like that."
"Maybe," Gabi hisses, knuckles going white as she tightens her grip on her silverware, "before you make my fucking decisions for me, you should actually ask how I feel, Nigel."
It comes out only slightly more scathing than she means it to, and he drops his gaze to a palm tree on the cheap, plastic-coated flannel tablecloth's tropical print.
He doesn't look hurt, though, or like he'd been expecting any other reaction.
Gabi has to flex her hands around her fork and knife for a moment before she can gather her composure and speak around the sudden lump in her throat. "I was the only person to come to your funeral, Nigel. I was the only one." Her voice cracks, sounding raw. "Do you know how that felt?"
"I had things I had to do." He keeps his voice soft and careful. "I―"
"Just shut up."
"I―"
"Shut up." Tears sting at the corners of her eyes and the silverware slips from her hands.
She doesn't realise he'd even moved until he had her jaw cupped in one palm and a big thumb stroking over her cheekbone, wiping at her tears and the streaks they left in her makeup.
"I was selfish. But I'm here now."
"That isn't good enough."
There is hurt in his eyes, but he presses a kiss to her forehead.
"I know, beautiful. I know."
"No, you don't."
Nigel doesn't dare to argue with that.
Gabi expected that at some point, Nigel would try to bum money off of her―for a cab or cigarettes, lottery tickets or liquor or calling card minutes―but he doesn't.
He always has money of his own, which isn't necessarily that unusual, but he also doesn't ever seem to work. He spends most of his time lounging on her sofa, yelling in Romanian at talk show hosts and soap opera actors on the television, smoking. He leaves to buy cigarettes or go to the ATM down at the corner store, and sometimes he walks her to work and back, but that's about it.
Where he gets the money, Gabi doesn't know, and she doesn't think she wants to ask, not now, when they've just found a precarious balance of unanswered, unasked questions and slowly fading tensions.
It's not as if Nigel would tell her the truth, even if she asked, and it was easier to suffer mystery than to be lied to. At least he wasn’t trying to leech something off of her.
She comes home to him watching re-runs of Jeopardy! at night and sprawls out beside him on the sofa, steals his cigarette from between his fingers and takes a drag even though she quit smoking four months ago.
In the grey light that filters through the blinds, Nigel looks old, far older than she knows he is. The scars on his skin seem more prominent, the lines and wrinkles around his eyes more visible, his hair finally more silver than blonde.
He smiles at her, and she thinks of when her mother told her that dogs always come home to die.
She fakes a smile back and yells an answer at the television.
At least Nigel thought of her as home.