“Fine.” I tear off a corner of the mystery meat and hold it out. He sniffs it, recoils, and gives me a look that clearly communicates:I expected better from you.
“Yeah, well. Join the club.” I only eat well when my clients are paying for it. Every spare dime I have goes to Dad’s legal team who apparently want my nonexistent firstborn child to chip a few years off from his sentence.
I eat in the dead silence, annoyed by the sound of my own chewing, trying not to stress about the promise I made to Anne Carrington three days ago. A hundred thousand dollars by fall? What the actual fuck was I thinking? I said the words like they were nothing, like I had that kind of money sitting in a sock drawer somewhere. Like I wasn’t already drowning in my father’s debts with no life raft in sight.
Joy deserves to go to Stanford. She’s worked her entire life for that acceptance letter, and she shouldn’t have to give it up because my dad decided to play Robin Hood in reverse—stealing from people who trusted him and keeping it all for himself.
But a hundred thousand dollars.
I set my fork down, appetite gone. And not just because the gray-ish mystery meat is scalded on the outer rim and still a little frozen in the middle.
Releasing a deep exhale, I force myself to think about anything else outside of the pressure of my impossible promise. Unfortunately, my brain—the traitor that it is—immediately swaps out one form of self-torture for another.
My phone is right there on the coffee table, and I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s self-destructive and pointless and will only make me feel worse. But my fingers are already moving, already typing her name into the search bar, already pulling up the profile I swore I’d never look at again.
Alaina Carrington.
Her profile picture is new. She’s on a beach somewhere—Turks and Caicos, maybe, or one of those other places that rich people go to feel richer—wearing a white sundress and laughing at something off-camera. She looks happy. Genuinely, radiantly happy in a way I’m not sure I ever made her.
I scroll down.
There he is. Bradley. The fiancé. And as advertised in the vacation photos, this guy isn’t just rich. He’s Scrooge McDuck rich.
He’s exactly what I expected: clean-cut, strong jaw, the kind of guy who probably played lacrosse at some Ivy League school and summers as a verb. His arm is around Alaina in every photo, possessive but casual, like she’s always been his.
Met the love of my life three years ago today, his caption reads.Can’t wait to make her my wife.
Three years ago.
That math doesn’t sit right in my stomach. Three years ago, Alaina and I were still together. Three years ago, I was planning to propose at the Marionette with her parents’ blessing. Three years ago, I thought I knew exactly what my future looked like.
Did she meet him before or after she left me? Did our timelines overlap? Was she already falling for Mr. Lacrosse while I was picking out rings and rehearsing speeches and believing we had a future?
I scroll further. Engagement photos. More vacation photos. Photos of them at restaurants that look suspiciously like our old spots. There’s one of them at a rooftop bar I used to take her to—our bar, the place where we had our first real date where I made it clear I was no longer interested in playing ball in the friend zone. He’s kissing her cheek in the same spot where I told her she was the one. I study the image closer… How can she laugh for the camera like that when the ghost of us is surrounding her?
A vise clamps around my ribs, squeezing until I can barely breathe.
I slam my phone down. Self-destruction has a rhythm—first the search, then the scroll, then the crushing weight in my chest as I’m reminded exactly why I scrubbed her from my digital life, why that diamond sits in some stranger’s jewelry box, and why I’ve tried to surgically remove two decades of memories like deleting corrupted files.
But some nights, the masochism wins.
I close the app before I spiral any further.
None of it matters. She’s moved on. Anne told me to move on. Everyone keeps telling me to move on, like it’s as simple asdeciding—like I can flip a switch and stop loving someone I’ve loved since I was six years old.
Black Cat head-butts my elbow, which is his version of emotional support. I scratch behind his ears and he purrs like a motorboat with a cold—raspy and gurgled. He probably needs a vet visit for that raspy purr, but there’s something about filling out paperwork with my name in the “owner” field that I’m not ready for. We have an arrangement—I provide the tuna, he provides the judgment—but making it official feels like tempting fate. The minute you start calling something yours is usually when the universe decides to take it away.
“You know what we need?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. He’s a cat.
“We need to take the edge off.”
I haul myself off the couch and dig through the kitchen cabinet where I keep my stash—a small tin of gummies I bought from my favorite dispensary last month. I don’t excessively partake, but tonight most definitely calls for chemical assistance.
I pop one in, just one, because I’m not trying to end up on my kitchen floor having an existential crisis. Then I glance at BlackCat, who has followed me into the kitchen and is now sitting expectantly by his food bowl.
“Oh, you want some too?”
