“I don’t care that it meant nothing,” I said, which was at least partially a lie. “I care about you lying to me.” That part was true. My lip curled. “You had sex with someone else, Wells. Someone who, by the way, you’ve referred to as anobligation. To honor your best friend.”
His exhale was extended. “I know.”
“How could you do this to me? To us?”
He crossed his arms and leaned against his propped pillows. “I’m not like you. I’m not perfect.”
A strangled sound of fury started low, somewhere near my belly button, and landed directly between us. I’d never snarled at something before. “Perfect?Perfect?Everyone on earth isflawed, Wells. Not being perfect doesn’t give you license to have secret sex with your dead best friend’s sister in what wassupposedto become our marital bed.”
Wells pulled a T-shirt over his head, grimacing when he stretched its cotton neck. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It’s—we both miss Charley. One thing led to another. It was a moment of incredible weakness, and I regretted risking everything you and I have the second it happened.”
Past tense. Everything wehad. Stability. Love. A future. Iblinked against rage tears. “How could you throw away our lives like this?”
He stared at me. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Want. I wanted him to say this was all a huge misunderstanding. That it was a spam text. That Cambrey had been hacked. I was a champion of truth, of research, of information. Wells always said that even though we lived in a brownstone, my real home was in an internet rabbit hole. When I was a kid, I asked Santa for the discarded library microfiche. Real-life learning was the brain equivalent of sucking the juice from a wax bottle of candy my grandmother used to have: a jolt, a zing, the insatiable need for more. But right now, I wanted to unlearn everything. “Nothing. There’s nothing I want from you anymore,” I said.
He shook his head. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
“All the time.” I clenched my teeth. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes. You learn more from them than you do from good decisions. But I made easy mistakes, not ones that led me to a place I couldn’t come back from, because you only get one life. I intended to wring mine dry. Unlike my sister, for example, whose experiment with ketamine led to her death.Ketamine, of all things, that lost-and-found trend of a drug. “Does her husband know?”
Wells hesitated. “No.”
My nostrils flared. “What about her toddler?” An obscenely adorable baby whose name—Julep—I’d diplomatically pretended to like. We’d watched her one afternoon last summer so Cambrey and her husband could go on a date in the city. I growled under my breath again.
“How can we move past this?” Wells pleaded.
There was no coming back from this. Natalie always saidyou don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you, and that was one of the biggest truisms I’ve experienced, from friends to jobs to apartments to now, unbelievably, Wells.
I opened my mouth to say that we most certainly would not, could not move past this. But a strange jangling sliced through the air. At first, I figured it was the fire alarm, which was more likely than what was actually happening. My phone, ringing. For a shared second, we were both stunned into silence.
Two
Something was wrong.
Something beyond the fact that my personal life was mid-implosion. It was the only plausible explanation for my phone to ring in the middle of the night, especially on a Monday. My mouth went dry.
I made my way toward it, my mind pinwheeling. It could be Natalie, with champagne rolling through her veins in Palm Springs—she was at one of the many Kim cousins’ bachelorette parties. Before four a.m. in New York meant it wasn’t even one there. The alternative was my parents, who should very much not be calling now. I was halfway between drunk dial and a parent’s possible stroke when I reached the phone and read my producer’s name.
Samantha Marquis had never called me before four in the morning in the history of my employment. As a reporter—in my case, an ironic title for someone who writes the stories, not for someone who reports them—I wasn’t exactly priority one boarding at Per Diem. I storyboard and storywrite, so I did my own makeup and wore my own clothes, unlike the on-air team. I wasn’t even in charge of selecting breaking news, only in developing it as assigned. The only time my face had ever graced the screen was after Wells’s proposal had gone somewhat viral, and I’d agreed to do a human-interest segment after someone actually famous had canceled their appearance.
I was punctual. I produced quality work. I attended optional work events dressed in one of the black dresses I kept bagged and tagged in my closet.
But I could be the best writer on the planet, and Samantha would still not call me enough times straight in the middle of the night to break the setting and make my phone sound.
I pressed the green answer button.
“Olivia?” My name was a bark in her mouth.
I raised my eyebrows. “Samantha?”
“Oh, thank god. I’ve beencalling. You gotta get in here now. Can you believe what’s going on?”
“What’s going on,” I repeated. I glared at Wells, as if Samantha herself was a participant in the cataclysmic breakup taking place on my beloved bed. I cleared my throat. “Can you be more specific, Sam?”
“I’m sending a car for you.”
“Forme?”
