I leave her with the notepad and the question.
The pen starts moving again after a minute. I stay perfectly still and let her have it.
All of it. Unwitnessed. Uncollected.
Hers.
Fifteen
Piper
The sun is barely up when I slip out of the room.
I leave a note on the nightstand:Gone for coffee, back soon. It seems rude to vanish after the man has spent the last eighteen hours essentially reorganizing his entire life around my crisis. The least I can do is come back with caffeine.
The morning air outside the hotel is cool, so I stop on the pavement and just breathe.
Opal Creek. Not a bad place to have a breakdown.
The streets are busier than I expected—a delivery van idling outside a bakery and a man arranging a fruit stand. I pass a hardware store that apparently opens at 6 a.m. because country music is already bleeding out of the propped-open door.
I haven’t reallylookedat anything since running from the church. I’ve been moving from one crisis to another with my eyes on the middle distance, just trying to stay upright. But this morning, in yesterday’s new jeans and with no one needing anything from me, I can just… see.
I’m doing quite well. I’m just a normal woman having a normal morning walk.
Two women are sitting outside a café up ahead. They spot me from half a block away. One leans toward the other. The other nods. They both stare.
You’re being paranoid.
I’m having a difficult week, emotionally speaking, and I’ve manufactured a fantasy where random strangers in a town I’ve never visited are aware of my personal drama.
I smile at them as I pass.
One of them says, clear as a bell, just as I push open the door to the coffee shop: “That’s her.”
I’d ignore it, but when I step inside, every single head in the place turns toward me.
It isn’t a subtle glance-up-from-the-menu. It’s fullstranger-just-walked-into-a-Wild-West-saloonattention. I freeze. One man lowers his newspaper. The barista stares at me, clutching a carton of milk.
“Morning?” I offer.
Nobody answers. The whispering picks back up like someone turned a dial.
“Can I get two coffees?” I ask the barista.
She leans forward. “You’re her, aren’t you? The bride?”
The acoustics in here are extraordinary. The whole room hears it.
Oh, no. I’m going to die. Right here, in Opal Creek, I’m finally going to succumb to the shame.
I reach for my wallet out of habit… my wallet, which sits in my bag. My bag, in the apartment in the city. With Ezra. Along with my phone, my cards, and everything else I own.
The realization hits me square in the chest. I’ve reached theno-resourcesstage of my collapse.
“Shit,” I say quietly. “I can’t—I don’t have anything with me. I can’t pay.”
“It’s fine.” I turn to see Griffin behind me, looking like a man who threw himself together in three minutes flat. His shirt is wrinkled, and his hair is doing that thing men’s hair does when it should look terrible but instead looks like it belongs in a high-end editorial.
