Some more sorries.
Some more ringing ears.
Some more platitudes.
No. No, he didn’t cheat on me? No, he simply confessed his love to someone who was not me? I was trying to jam the pieces of the puzzle together, but nothing fit. Every sentence he said was incompatible with the last.
Finally my hearing caught on something that seemed important, if only I could figure out the context: a week.
“A week?” I said.
He nodded. “She’s waiting for me now, so we can leave right away. Not be in your hair while you figure things out.”
“A week,” I repeated, still not understanding.
“I looked online.” He shifted forward on the couch to pull a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket, and handed it to me.
Some truly deluded part of me thought it would be an apology note, a love letter that made all of this . . . not okay, but maybe salvageable.
Instead it was a printout of local apartment listings.
“You’re moving out?” I choked.
A flush crept up his neck, his eyes darting toward the front door. “Well, no,” he said. “The house is in my name, so . . .”
He trailed off, expecting me to fill in the blank.
Finally, I did.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Peter?” I jumped up. I didn’t feel hurt then. That would come later. First it was all rage.
He stood too, brows shooting toward his perfect hairline. “We didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Of course she fucking meant for this to happen, Peter! She had twenty-five years to tell you she was in love with you and chose last night!”
“She didn’t realize,” he said, defensive of her. Protecting her from the blast of this emotional fallout while I was here on my own. “Not until she was faced with losing me.”
“You brought me here!” I half screamed. At the end, it turned into a sort of deranged laugh. “I left my friends. My apartment. My job. My entire life.”
“I feel so terrible,” he said. “You have no idea.”
“I have no idea how bad you feel?” I demanded. “Where am I supposed to go?”
He gestured to the apartment listings, now on the ground. “Look,” he said. “We’re going out of town to give you space to figure things out. We won’t be back until next Sunday.”
We.
Back.
Oh.
Oh, god.
It wasn’t just that I was expected to move out.
She was moving in. After they got back from a sexy new-couple vacation that was being pitched to me like an act of kindness for my benefit. I almost asked where they were going, but the last thing I needed was a mental picture of them kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
(Wrong. I’d later learn they’d been kissing along the Amalfi Coast.)
“I’m really sorry, Daph,” he said, and leaned in to kiss my forehead like some benevolent father figure, regretfully shipping off for war to do his duty.
I shoved him away, and his eyes widened in shock for just a second. Then he nodded, somberly, and headed for the door, totally empty-handed. Like he had everything he needed and not a lick of it was in this house.
As the door fell shut, something snapped in me.
I grabbed one of the bulk containers of Jordan almonds Mrs. Collins had picked up on her last Costco trip, and ran outside, still in the silk pajamas Peter bought me last Christmas.
He cast a wild-eyed look over his shoulder at me as he hoisted himself into the passenger seat of Petra’s open-top Jeep. She kept her face decidedly pointed away.
“You are such a fucking asshole!” I hurled a handful of almonds at him.
He gave a yelp. I threw another handful at the tailgate. Petra started the car.
I chased them down the driveway, then threw the whole bucket at the Jeep. It hit a wheel and went skidding to the side of the road as they peeled off into the sunset.
Sunrise. Whatever.
“Where am I going to go?” I asked feebly as I sank onto the dew-damp grass of our—their—front yard.
I stayed there watching the road for probably ten minutes. Then I went back inside and cried so hard it might’ve made me vomit, if I hadn’t completely forgotten to eat the night before. I wasn’t much of a cook, and besides that, Peter was extremely careful with his diet. Low carbs, high protein. I dug around our understocked cabinets and started making Easy Mac.
Then someone started pounding on the door.
Fool that I am, my only guess was that Peter had come back. That he’d made it to the airport only for a burst of clarity to send him racing home to me.
But when I opened the door, I found Miles, red-eyed from either crying or smoking, and brandishing a three-sentence note that Petra had left him on their coffee table, as if it were a pitchfork or maybe a flag of surrender.
“Is she here?” he asked thickly.
“No.” Numbness settled over me. “I threw some almonds at them and they drove away.”
He nodded, the sorrow deepening across his face, as if he knew exactly what that meant, and it wasn’t good.
“Shit,” he rasped, slumping against the doorframe.
I swallowed a knot that felt like barbed wire. Or maybe it was a tangle of the Vincent family practicality I’d inherited from my mother, that old familiar ability to use those negative emotions as fuel to Get. Shit. Done.
“Miles,” I said.
He looked up, his expression wrecked but with a bit of hope lurking somewhere between his eyebrows. Like he thought I might announce this whole thing was an extremely fun and not sociopathic prank.
“How many bedrooms does your apartment have?” I asked.
OceanofPDF.com
3
SATURDAY, MAY 18TH
91 DAYS UNTIL I CAN LEAVE
Honestly, Miles Nowak is a good roommate.
Aside from occasional invitations to watch a movie, or texts to ask whether I need anything from the market, he leaves me to my own devices. After my request that he only smoke outside, he really must have stopped merely sticking his head out the window, because weeks pass without me smelling weed in the hallway. There’s no more mournful blasting of Jamie O’Neal either. In fact, he seems totally fine. I never would’ve guessed he was a man fresh off a horrible heartbreak if I hadn’t seen his face six weeks ago, on the day it happened.
Without discussing it, we pretty easily figured out a bathroom schedule that works. He’s a night owl, and I usually get up around six thirty or seven in the morning, regardless of whether I’m working the library’s opening shift or not. And since he’s rarely home, he never leaves stacks of dirty dishes “soaking” in the sink.
But the apartment itself is tiny. My bedroom is a glorified closet.
In fact, Petra used it as one, when she lived here.
A year ago, the meager dimensions wouldn’t have been a problem.
As long as I could remember, I’d been a staunch minimalist. From the time my parents separated, Mom and I had moved around a lot, chasing promotions at the bank where she worked, and then, eventually, helping open new branches. We never had professional movers, just the help of whichever guy was trying and failing to score a date with Mom at the time, so I learned to travel light.
I made a sport of figuring out the absolute least amount of things I needed. It helped that I was such a library kid and didn’t have metric tons of annotated paperbacks. Books were the only thing I was gluttonous about, but I didn’t care about owning them so much as absorbing their contents.
