But that’s the thing about cheap fixes: they only look good from a distance. Up close, under the bright lights of Olivia’s kitchen, the seams would show. She was the woman who noticed when a picture frame was off by a millimeter. She’d pick at the story and find the weak spot.
And when the truth finally broke through, six months or ten years from now, it wouldn’t just break her heart. It would make her feel like a fool. Like everyone she loved had looked her in the eye and lied to her.
My phone buzzed in the cup holder.
Ben, please. I need to talk to you.
I looked at the two desperate sentences.
No, I couldn’t lie to her. Olivia didn't deserve a patch job. She deserved the truth, even if it was going to bury her.
I swung the truck around, tires chirping against the asphalt, and headed toward the suburbs. My stomach felt like I’d swallowed wet concrete.
I was going to walk into her house, and I was going to finish what the crash started. I was going to take the memory of my best friend and shatter it.
I wiped my hands on my jeans, but the dust didn't come off. It was ground into the skin, into the calluses.
I pulled up to a stop sign and took a breath that tasted like grit.
"Sorry, Ryan," I said to the empty cab.
Then I drove to tell his wife the truth.
Chapter 8
Olivia
Idon’t know how long I sat on the floor.
The kitchen went dark around me, the shadows closing in until the room felt smaller, closer.
My legs had gone numb, a prickly static working its way up to my knees, but I didn't move. Moving would require a plan, and I didn't have one. I had spent eight years building a life on precision—calendars synced, meals planned, preferences archived.
It had taken a ten-second phone call to level it.
Ryan?
The voice echoed in the quiet house. Soft. Worried. Intimate.
I just want to know you’re okay.
Ryan’s phone sat on the granite above me. It was probably full of more missed calls by now. Texts that would go unread, and voice mails that would sit in a digital purgatory, waiting for a dead man to listen to them.
I pulled myself up using the cabinet handles, my muscles stiff and protesting. The house was freezing. I hadn’t touched the thermostat since the police left on Friday, and the January chill had found its way through the double-paned windows, settlingdeep into the walls. It felt like the house itself had died when Ryan did.
I stood there, swaying slightly, gripping the edge of the counter to ground myself.
I should call her back.
The thought was clinical. I should pick up the phone, press the call button, and tell this woman—this stranger—the truth. Ryan was gone. The man she was looking for wouldn’t be returning her calls, and whatever conversation they were supposed to have, whatever "ending" was promised, had been preempted by a patch of black ice and a guardrail.
But I couldn't make my hand move. The idea of hearing her voice again, of confirming that she existed, made bile rise in my throat.
Instead, I turned to the cabinet above the sink.
I pushed aside the boxes of herbal tea and the vitamins Ryan swore by and reached for the bottle of whiskey he kept in the back. It was an expensive single malt, something his sister had brought over for Christmas. Ryan made a production of drinking it, swirling it in the glass, talking about peat and oak.
I hated whiskey, the smell and burn of it.
