I’m grateful I chose this route. I’m even more grateful Sam let me rent it in her name to avoid anything else Ryan could track, despite my name being legally changed. The extra precaution makes me feel better.
The drive will give me time to process everything that happened over the course of the last six months. It’ll give me time to grieve and try to move on.Move forward.
He broke his promise, and it snapped me out of my irrational thinking and back into logic. Back into my original plan – running.
There were instincts I thought I’d built up over the years of working in healthcare. But after Ryan, it was hard to accept the fact I’d been wrong about the one person who was part of the foundation of my life. And I’d been so foolish to let it happen again.
I kept the couch.
It’s my reminder that even on the days it’s empty, it was once filled with people I love. It’s my reminder that nothing is forever, and change is ever present.
I walk into my kitchen that is now scattered with boxes, glancing around the growing empty space. I’m going to miss this apartment. This city. It’s healed me in ways I never expected it too, and clearly it gave me a life and friends I never anticipatedI’d have.
I let it serve as proof that I’m capable of starting over again.
If I could have such a great experience here, I can have it wherever I go next, too.
I sip my coffee, looking around my almost empty apartment, imagining the day I’d picked it out, so scared, thinking life is so unfair.
Some things don’t change.
Because that’s life.
So fucking unfair.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
SUNNY
I tape box after box,lost in my own thoughts. It’s all hitting me at once as I stand alone in my almost empty apartment, wrapping up my final moments here.
It’s becoming too real.I am leaving.
Clearly I’m not good at the leaving thing. I spent my whole life living in one place. Moving around will take adjustment like anything else, but it’s something I have to do. Or at least, that’s what I try to convince myself.
Tomorrow morning is my target departure considering my tired body desperately needs a night's rest. So I lay on my mattress, looking through my emails to confirm the start date of my next job. I sit up, realizing Ryan and I’s anniversary is coming up.
Once upon a time, the thought made me giddy. I loved tallying those months that turned to years. I was proud of the ever-growing number.
Then I realize…
I count the years on my hand and gasp as the realization dawns on me.
My fucking IUD expired.
Panicked gasps leave my lips as I stare at the number on my trembling hand. My heart beating a litany of screams as to how I could let this slip.
I’d gotten an IUD around the time we started dating so we could be safe. Five years comes and passes so easily. I changed my number so I didn’t receive my reminder texts and calls from my doctor’s office back home.
I clutch the phone in my trembling hand, trying to back track to when it expired. I’d gotten it a few months before our actual anniversary date so my body would adjust… when we’d started talking. Which means it expiredat leasttwo months ago.
Fuck.
TYLER
“We can just bail,” Sam says while we both sit in her jeep outside of our parents’ house.
I look at the red brick and marble pillars, wondering how I still come back when once upon a time I’d tallied the days until I was able to get out.
