“We’re not staying here,” she said, with resolve. “You’re not going to giving them the power to watch you fall apart.”
Them.
The word changed something inside me, solidified the truth.
They weren’t my people.
He wasn’t my future.
He wasn’t mine at all.
I nodded, because there was a numbness spreading through me, because the only thing keeping me upright was her arm around my waist.
She guided me to her car. Buckled me in when my hands shook too hard to do it myself. Closed the door with the gentleness I haven’t seen before.
Then she leaned in through the open window, her forehead pressing against mine.
“Listen to me,” she whispered, her voice unsteady. “The people in there, don’t matter anymore.”
My breath shuddered. Another tear slipped.
Jenny wiped it away.
“Come home with me.”
She started the car. As the engine hummed to life and the house shrank in the rearview mirror, the final pieces of the future I thought I had scattered like the petals on the doorstep behind me.
He had proven everyone right.
I asked Jenny to take me to my mom’s.
She glanced at me from the driver’s seat, already turning toward the road that led to her apartment, then changed course without arguing. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. The car hummedbeneath us. My hands were folded in my lap so tightly my fingers ached. I stared out the window and tried to breathe normally.
Jenny finally said my name, gently, like she was checking I was still there.
“I just need my mom,” I said. My voice sounded distant.
She nodded. “Okay.”
My mother’s house looked exactly the same. White siding. Wide front windows. The porch light already on, even though it wasn’t fully dark yet. For whatever reason that almost undid me. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed something untouched.
She was sitting in her reading chair when we walked in, legs crossed, book open in her lap. Tall and elegant even at rest, honey-blond hair swept back loosely, the same hair I’d inherited. She looked up, and the moment her eyes landed on my face, she was already moving.
“Claire?” she said, alarm sharp in her voice.
She crossed the room in seconds, hands lifting to my arms, my shoulders, like she was checking for injuries she couldn’t see. “What happened?”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
My throat closed hard, the words backing up behind it, useless. I shook my head once. My mom turned immediately to Jenny.
“Jennifer,” she said, steady but urgent. “Tell me.”
Jenny hesitated. I could see her trying to choose words that wouldn’t hurt me more than I was already hurting. She failed.
“We,” Jenny swallowed. “We caught Ethan cheating.”
My mother didn’t ask questions. She said one sharp, vicious curse that I’d only heard from her a handful of times in my life, and then her arms were around me.
