It’s all just gone now. The building, the people, all moving on to their inevitable fates, the memories burned to ash.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. The cracks are still there. The apartment is still empty. And somewhere across this city, Saylor is checking his phone and seeing my cancellation text and probably thinking I’m fine, because I wrotenot feelingwellinstead of what I actually am, which is broken open, gutted, lying in the debris of a friendship I destroyed with my own cowardice.
I picture the baby. I do this sometimes—close my eyes and try to imagine her, even though I don’t know if it’s aheryet, even though Raven’s next ultrasound hasn’t happened. I picture a girl anyway, because Whitney would have a girl. Red curls. Freckles. Whitney’s face in miniature—those eyes that always saw too much, that always knew the truth before you said it, staring up at me from a bassinet with the quiet, devastating expectation of someone who is counting on me to be better than I’ve been.
One day, this child with Whit’s eyes will look at me and I will have to be the woman Whitney believed I could be—not the one who walked back into the restaurant. Not the one who chose Greg. Not the one who spent two years rehearsing an apology she never made.
The brave one. The one Whit kept waiting for. The one who was always in there, somewhere underneath the high-end pantsuits and the executive boardrooms and the perfectly structured life, too afraid to live until it was too late.
I can’t be too late again.
I sit up. The room tilts, but less. The headache pulses, but quieter. My hands are still trembling, but I realize in perfect timing, my hands have trembled before and still cut fabric, still sketched, still held a pen steady enough to sign divorce papers. Trembling is not the same as broken. Trembling is what happens when something inside you is trying to move.
I don’t turn my phone on.Not yet.The world can wait another hour. For now, I sit in the bright, empty penthouse and let myself feel all of it—the grief, the anger, the guilt, the terrifying hope—without folding any of it into squares, without locking it in drawers, without designing my way around it.
For now, I just sit with it.
It’s the bravest thing I’ve done all week.
chapter 11
Saylor
Forrest drives like a man who learned on dirt roads and never fully adjusted to the concept of lanes. His left hand is loose on the wheel of the rented pickup, his right elbow hanging out the window despite the fact it’s fifty degrees and the wind is turning his knuckles pink. The truck bed is loaded with everything Home Depot had to offer at seven in the morning on a Wednesday—paint rollers, drip cloths, a power drill, three different grades of sandpaper, wood filler, a shop vac, and a cooler full of water bottles and gas-station jerky because Forrest insisted that “you can’t renovate on an empty stomach, that’s how people lose fingers.”
“So let me get this straight,” Forrest says, merging onto I-87 with the casual aggression of someone who genuinely does not see other cars as obstacles. “You met Celeste two weeks ago. At a funeral. Where you were her hired date. And now you’re renovating her childhood home?”
“Contract work. She’s paying me.”
“Contractor rates.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And you called me at six in the morning to help because?—”
“Because you’re my friend and I asked nicely.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Hawk, get up. I need your hands.’ And then you hung up. That’s not asking nicely. That’s a hostage negotiation without the negotiation.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am.” He reaches into the cooler wedged between us and pulls out a stick of jerky. Tears it with his teeth. “Because I’m a good person and also because Koda is with her mother, and Sora kicked me out of the house so she could write in peace. Apparently I’m a distraction.”
“Because you can’t keep your hands off of her,” I say. “Hard to write a book when you’re on your back with your legs in the air.”
“That’s the love of my life you’re talking about.”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m on her side. Leave that poor girl alone and let her work. It’s exhausting being your girlfriend. Or…wait. Fiancée now?”
Forrest smiles. “I got the ring. Mr. Cooper, sort of reluctantly, gave me his permission. I just have to figure out how to ask her.”
“Will. You. Marry. Me. Four words, mate. Not that complicated.”
“You’re about as romantic as a cactus, know that?”
Forrest has the grin that made him one of Rina’s most requested escorts before Sora came along and retired him—easy, warm, the kind of smile that makes people feel like they’ve been friends with him for years when they’ve known him for minutes. He’s wearing a flannel with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and work boots that actually have mud on them, because Forrest is the only person I know in New York City who owns work boots with real mud. Ranch kid from Wyoming turned fancy law student. Spent his childhood moving cattle and mending fences before trading it all for Manhattan, which, when you think aboutit, involves a similar skill set—reading the herd, keeping things calm, knowing when to get out of the way.
“So what exactly are we doing when we get there?” he asks.
