I stretched out on the couch, pulled the blanket up, and looked at the ceiling. She'd driven hours in a wedding dress toward a man who'd already gone. She'd arrived at a stranger's door in the dark and walked through it anyway, and she laid out the whole of it—voice level, chin up—without flinching once.
That wasn't a woman who was broken.
That was a woman who was just now figuring out she was free.
I closed my eyes.
3
PANDORA
The dress was the first thing I saw when I woke up.
It was hanging over the bathroom door where I'd put it last night. In the gray morning light, it looked like something from a different life. Which it was.
That was a thought I turned away from because it was too early and I hadn't had coffee yet. I wasn't ready to know what I actually felt about that.
I lay there for a minute in the middle of a bed that wasn't mine, in a flannel shirt that wasn't mine—I'd kicked the sweats off sometime in the night—listening to the sounds of someone moving around in the kitchen. The river was audible through the window. Birds. The quiet of mountains in the morning, which was its own kind of sound.
My phone had twelve percent battery left. I plugged it in with the charger I'd found on the nightstand—Hayes must have put it there, I hadn't noticed last night—and watched the screen light up with everything I'd been ignoring.
Eleven missed calls. Six voicemails. A cascade of texts from my mother that I scrolled past without reading.
One text from a number I didn't recognize, sent at two in the morning.Sorry, Pandora.
That was all. No explanation. No forwarding address. Just sorry.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and went to find the coffee.
Hayes was at the stove. He had eggs going in a cast-iron pan, and the coffee was already made. He looked up when I came in, then looked back at the stove like my being there was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"How do you take it?" he said.
"Black is fine."
He poured a mug and set it on the counter. I climbed onto the barstool and didn't say anything. He didn't say anything either.
It should have been awkward, but it wasn't. He just moved around the kitchen like I'd always been sitting there, like my presence asked nothing of him and he was making no demands of mine. I found myself watching the easy way he moved—unhurried, comfortable in his own body the way some people just were—and something in my chest unclenched by a degree I hadn't anticipated.
He put eggs in front of me without asking if I was hungry.
I ate them.
Outside, the light was coming up slowly through the trees. The particular gold of early mountain morning that the city never had. I'd been to the mountains twice in my life, both times with my parents, both times to places they'd chosen. I'd never had a morning like this one. Quiet in a way that asked nothing.
My mother would want a plan. She'd have the name of a hotel, a return timeline, a script for what to tell people. I could feel the weight of that waiting for me on the other side of this mug of coffee—all the logistics of dismantling a life—and I kept not reaching for it.
"You don't have to figure anything out today," Hayes said, like he'd read it on my face.
"I told my landlord I was moving out at the end of the month," I said. "For him."
"We won't worry about that today."
I looked at him. He was leaning against the counter across from me with his own coffee, and he wasn't trying to fix anything. He wasn't pulling out a legal pad, wasn't doing the thing people did where they threw solutions at a problem because sitting with it made them uncomfortable.
He just meant it. No worries today.
"I keep waiting to feel worse," I said. "I feel like I should feel worse."