He looked up then, his eyes heavy and full. “We had a deal. Thirty and single.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I cried. “We also had a friendship based on being the only people in the world we could trust, and years of sharing all the horrible things we had to go through, and you took the worst of those things and used it as leverage.”
“Your father had nothing to do with this,” he said.
“There is no way in the world I’ll ever believe that,” I said. “Just admit I was a pawn in your chess game. Give me that much.”
He sliced a hand through the air. “No.”
I gripped the dining chair in front of me. “Then get the hell out.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
The look he gave me was one of pure agony and I appreciated that. I hoped he was in as much pain as I was. I hoped he felt like his bones were breaking and his organs were being ripped out because I certainly did. “Okay. Great. I’ll leave.”
I stormed through the bedroom and into the closet to grab my suitcase. I tossed it on the bed and started throwing clothes and shoes and cell phone chargers inside.
“Emme. Slow down. Please. You’re not going anywhere,” he said from the doorway.
“You don’t seem to understand that I just sat through the first conversation I’ve had with my father in eight years andthat it also was another one of the many emotionally grueling experiences I’ve had this year. And at the end of it, I had the pleasure of discovering that my best friend manipulated me intomarryinghim as a maneuver to push that emotionally overwhelming father out of the way of your business deals. You’re not the one deciding what I do or where I go but I can promise I’m not staying here with you.” I stomped into the bathroom and swept all my makeup into a bag. I’d regret it later, but I wasn’t about to slow down and pack everything carefully now. “Either you go snuggle up with Hersberler tonight or you watch me walk out the door.”
“Just give me a minute to explain,” he said.
I tossed a few more things into my luggage before zipping it up. “Don’t you think you’ve asked enough of me yet? If there was an innocent explanation, you would’ve coughed it up by now. You don’t have one and I’m finished being a prop in this little production.”
He followed me through the suite and stopped near the door, his arms crossed and his legs braced like he was thinking of blocking my way. “I’ve made a mess of this. I’m sorry. But please don’t go.”
“Think of it like this,” I said, checking my shoulder bag for my wallet and phone. It wasn’t a good look to storm out only to knock on the door five minutes later. Not doing that. “You won’t have to lie about loving me anymore.”
His eyes flashed. “I never lied about that.”
I yanked the door open and pulled my luggage into the hall. “I used to think the worst thing that could happen to me would be losing you. But now I see it’s not losing you that hurts. It’s losing everything we had. It’s losing the past fifteen years of my life.”
“Emmeline.” He reached for me as I started down the hall. “Wait.Please.”
It was good that I’d turned away from him. He didn’t deserve my tears.
The first flightback to Boston departed from Las Vegas shortly after midnight. I spent the entire flight trying to trace back the roots of my newest disaster, desperate to find the place where it’d all gone wrong.
The answer, obviously, was that it’d gone wrong way back when we’d made that pact. Those sorts of things never worked out for anyone. But I’d thought I was losing Ryan to football, to Arizona, to the distance that would rush in when I didn’t have him in my life everyday. I’d wanted a reason to pull him back to me even after the years passed. Wanted to hold on as long as I could. I’d loved him—though I’d had no idea what that really meant until now.
I landed in Boston with the sunrise and hid from the fresh, new optimism of the day behind huge sunglasses and a floppy hat when I waved down a cab. I went straight to the condo and gathered only the basics. I’d come back another time for everything else. Or Ryan would make a call and have a crew of movers dispatched to pack and deliver the rest of it.
I was just about to the door when it swung open and my heart lurched, thinking Ryan had followed me back here. That he wasn’t letting me go without a fight. That there was a perfectly acceptable explanation that would make me feel a lot less like an object to be picked up and moved around whenever it suited people. That he’d never, ever do that to me.
But it was Ines.
She yelped, I dropped all fifteen of the tote bags I’d crammed my life into, and then we stared at each other for a minute.
“Why aren’t you in Las Vegas?” she asked.
“Why are you coming home at seven in the morning?”
She pushed her glasses up her nose with a look that saidMust I explain everything?“I spent the night with Jakobi, but I forgot to bring my weekend sneakers.” She motioned to me when I didn’t respond. “And what about you?”
I busied myself with gathering my totes again. That bought me a minute or two to decide how to explain this. It wasn’t complicated—he’d used me to get my dad to back off from a business deal—but it was massively complicated. We had fifteen years of friendship behind us and we knew each other in ways that no one else ever could. And if he’d just told me about my father’s role in this, I would’ve helped. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would’ve helped because that’s what friends did for each other.
“We had a fight,” was what I landed on.
