“I’m sorry, ma’am. If there’s nothing else I can help you with, I need to help the next guest in line. Next!”
Cardstock paper in my purse crumpled under my fingers, and I grabbed it and shoved it across the desk at Martinique. “Can you at least validate my parking?”
She rolled her eyes and swiped the card through a magnetic reader.“There.Now I have to ask you to leave.” Her eyes rolled up as she looked over my head. “Sir? I can helpyounow.”
I stumbled away from the front desk, my stupid eyes and nose running cold slime again.
At least if I made it to my car, no one could see me cry.
Later, I got a text from Jimmy:I want my ring back.
CHAPTER 7
the first night on the vegas strip
LEXI BYRNE
Even though I’dparked inside a shady covered garage a few blocks away from the Strip, my car slowly heated, first to sultry, then to boiling, and I finally rolled down the dang windows.
Concrete-roasted air rolled into the car, but I didn’t have the ability to stand up and leave.
Trying not to feel sorry for myself was consuming all my energy like a brushfire.
I had my phone, thank goodness, but I couldn’t fathom whom to call for help.
All my friends had been in that church whenheraccusations had hit me, and they’d all turned their backs on me and walked out.
My friends weren’t reallymyfriends. They were all Jimmy’s sisters, sisters-in-law, and cousins.
When sides needed to be taken, they’d chosen him because he was their family.
And I wasn’t.
Outside my car’s windshield, sharp shadows painted the inside of the garage black, but beyond the noses of the parked cars and the cement half-wall, white sunlight bleached the desert beige-white. The whole sky glared bright blue light.
One of my suitcases was still in the trunk of my car, stuffed with shorts and a couple of tank tops. I changed out of my wedding dress in the back seat.
Blast-furnace air dried the sweat on my skin.
At least I was cooler.
Leftover snacks for the road trip from Scottsbluff to Las Vegas still littered the seat and floor in the back. Lydia and I had traded off driving during the fourteen-hour straight-through trip a few days before. The remaining dozen water bottles for crossing the desert lay scattered behind the passenger seat.
Jimmy’s sisters and I had cleared out my apartment the week before, taking my clothes and my few kitchen items worth saving to Jimmy’s house and the rest to the Goodwill or the apartment complex’s trash bin. The complex’s management had only given me half my security deposit back, the jerks, because they could tell I’d filled the nail holes in the drywall with toothpaste instead of spackle.
My twin-size air mattress and sleeping bag were in the trunk, too.
Those paltry few things were all my possessions in the world, other than a few maxed-out credit cards and Jimmy’s engagement ring.
The white-hot sun walked across the sky above the parking garage, finally blasting the whole sky nuclear orange and yellow at sunset.
My eyes followed its path, my brain not even acknowledging my heartbeats marking minutes since Jimmy left me and my life had fluttered to the ground around me, my vision only tracingthe giant sun’s journey over the wide blue dome of the desert sky.
With the dark, the air wafting into the parking garage cooled a little, but the cement still radiated the day’s heat like a stove burner.
At eight-thirty that night, from my sweltering car in a Las Vegas parking garage, I called my mother.
She picked up. “Lexi? It’s past eight o’clock.”
