She started the car and just drove.
* * *
The streets blurred into each other. Tremont, Boylston, Beacon. Names she still mixed up when people gave directions. Boston was supposed to be a fresh start. She’d told herself that over and over when she packed up her apartment in Colorado. New job, new city, new chance to do everything right.
Now it all felt temporary again.
She stopped at a red light outside a late-night diner she’d gone to oncewith the photo crew. It was empty except for the cook leaning on the counter. For a second she thought about going in, about sitting at the corner booth and pretending she was just tired from a long shift, but she couldn’t move.
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.
She could still see Erin’s face when she’d said,You can’t protect me from something you caused.The words replayed until she thought she might scream.
She took a left and ended up downtown. The WCVB building rose ahead, the big red letters glowing against the glass. She pulled into the back lot out of habit, the same way she’d done every morning since she got hired. The lights were still on inside.
Through the window she could see movement, a producer walking across the floor, someone adjusting the camera at the anchor desk. It looked like a world she wasn’t part of yet, one that kept turning whether she was in it or not.
She’d been there only a few months, but she’d built her days around it. The early call times, the late edits, the coffee runs that made her feel like she belonged. She’d thought if she worked hard enough, it would start to feel like home. But Boston wasn’t home. Erin had been the part that made it feel close.
Jamie sat there, engine idling, the newsroom glow catching in her eyes. The ache in her chest deepened until she couldn’t breathe right. She turned the key and let the car go quiet again.
The silence pressed in.
She wanted to call someone, Harper maybe, or Tilly, but what would she even say? That she’d fallen for someone she was never supposed to, and lost them because she didn’t know how to stop being a reporter long enough to be a person?
She leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the steering wheel. “You blew it,” she whispered. “You really blew it.”
The words sounded flat in the small space.
She stayed there until the lights inside the station dimmed and the last car in the lot pulled away. Then she put the car in gear and drove the long wayhome.
* * *
Her apartment was dark when she walked in. She didn’t bother with the lights. The floor creaked the same way it always did. She dropped her bag on the couch and stood there, waiting for the silence to pass.
It didn’t.
She moved to the window and looked out over the street. Somewhere below, a siren wailed, distant and rising, then faded into nothing. She remembered Erin saying once that every sound in the city had a story behind it. Sirens, traffic, footsteps. Jamie wondered what story this one would tell about her.
She sat on the floor, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest. Her hands shook. Every part of her ached to text Erin, just to see the dots appear, to prove she wasn’t gone completely.
Instead, she turned her phone over and watched the screen stay dark.
It hit her all at once then, that this was really it. Erin wasn’t going to answer. She wasn’t going to come back. Jamie had made sure of that.
Her breath caught and broke. The tears came again, quieter this time, until they left her empty.
When the clock on the microwave blinked past midnight, she pulled herself off the floor, turned off her phone, and whispered into the dark, “Goodnight, Erin.”
The words barely made a sound, but they still hurt.
She went to bed knowing the city would wake up without her tomorrow, and that Erin already had.
Forty One
The fight wasn’t loud. It hadn’t needed to be. The words themselves were enough to split something open. Jamie’s voice had cracked, Erin’s had gone too calm, and the silence between them had done the rest.
Now it lived in her body, a low echo she couldn’t shake. It sat behind her ribs, in her hands, in the hollow of her throat. Every time she blinked, she saw the parking lot lights, the red of her own taillights fading in the mirror, Jamie shrinking in the rearview, still standing there, still waiting for something Erin couldn’t give her.
