“Drained. Hungry, but I don’t have any food in the house. I got rid of it all because we were supposed to be gone for two weeks.”
“We’ll be right over—what do you want?”
Rowan didn’t really want to people—even with Claudia and Maria. At the same time, she was starving and if she put them off now, they’d be there tomorrow come hell or high water.
“Pizza and ice cream.” The ultimate breakup food. Might as well go for broke.
“All right. We’ll be there soon.”
“Okay. Let yourselves in.”
“Okay. Bye.”
She slipped her phone under her pillow and curled up, staring at the wall, trying not to dwell on any of the thoughts flitting through her head. Tomorrow, after she’d hopefully had a good night’s sleep, would be soon enough to figure out what she should do. Whether she should try to call Michael. Whether she should go into work.
There she went thinking.
* * *
The bed jostledher awake and her eyes snapped open to find Claudia lying down in front of her.
“Hey,” Claudia said.
“Hey.”
Maria’s arm wrapped around her waist from behind. “I’m so sorry. I really felt like it was the right thing to do.”
“I’m not mad anymore,” she said. “I was when he showed up, but I figure if he found me at the church, he would have found me here or at work or anywhere else if he was really determined.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Maria said.
“I know you didn’t. It wasn’t too bad. I was able to say some things I’d wanted to say for a while and had never been able to.” She glanced over her shoulder. “But maybe next time you get one of your feelings you can just ask for some Tums?”
Maria smiled. “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try not to interfere anymore.”
“Thanks.” She rolled back over and faced Claudia.
“Do you know what you’re going to do?” Claudia asked.
“As much as I like my current plan of avoid-at-all-costs, I can’t do it forever. I can only have a pity party for so long and I can’t lay around feeling sorry for myself, as fun as that sounds. I’ll probably go into work tomorrow and figure out how to find out what normal looks like going forward.”
“We’re here if you need anything. You know that, right?”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“It might not be the right time, but…what happened between you and Luke?” Maria asked.
“You mean up at the cabin or before?”
“Both?”
“I want to know about the cabin,” Claudia said.
Rowan took a deep breath and summed up from Luke showing up at the door to when she dropped him off at the hotel.
“Wow,” Claudia said. “That’s…”
“Obnoxious and out of line?”
