“We have to! Wow, what a fairy tale,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Sad thing is you’re probably right. Lucky us.”
She huffed down the walkway to a far corner of the brick square outside the aquarium, far away from Arthur, where she could wait for her ride in peace. But first, she shot one last glare over her shoulder in case he dared try to follow her.
He didn’t. Only watched from afar until she climbed into the back seat of her ride and floated away.
20
Wren staggered through the frontdoor and kicked off her flats, sending them flying down the hallway. She slammed the door behind her. The apartment was dead quiet. It was weird being here without Arthur.
But she didn’t want to think about him right now. Or anything at all.
She’d been an idiot. Carrying around a ring, ready to propose to her boyfriend like this was all some modern fairy tale? What was she thinking? Of course it had been too good to be true, too good to last. Nothing good ever does.
It would persist, but she would be trapped. She’d have no choice but to live in the barren house, sleeping on an air mattress while Arthur attempted to fix it up, putting their baby to sleep in a drafty corner somewhere and eventually letting it do its tummy time right there on the concrete flooring. If and when Arthur was ever finished, she’d live out her days as the picture-perfect suburban mom, secretly getting by with various substances that allowed her to feel something, anything.
There she went, thinking again when she’d vowed not to.She set her sights on the sofa, beckoning to her like a siren, and flopped down into its softness. She turned on the TV. Wren and Arthur had promised they would startCake Island 2: The Dueltogether, and for a second she felt bad queuing it up without him. But this was, at the moment, the best revenge she could possibly get.
“Ferdie,” she called out, “get your ass over here. Mama needs snuggles.” She was also going to look into the feasibility of having an entire cake DoorDashed to the apartment so she could do terrible things to it.
Ferdie came limping in from the bedroom, moving glacially but happy to see her, tail wagging almost imperceptibly.
“There’s my boy.” Wren scooped him up and brought him into her chest, then started the show. “Love you the most, buddy.”
The two of them fell asleep like that before the first elimination.
In the morning, she opened her eyes with a tragic, naive hope that she’d feel better, that she’d discover a magical spring in her step. But that pit in her stomach was still there, her heart was heavy, and Arthur’s side of the bed was empty and cold. She’d never admit it out loud, but there was a part of her that had hoped he’d secretly returned in the night.
No such luck.
He was often up before her, but his spot was always warm, and though it usually annoyed her at the time, she was realizing just how quiet the apartment was without him clanging around, making more coffee, tapping away on his laptop, or“quietly” vacuuming with their little rechargeable hand vac. It made her want to strangle him on many a morning. And now it was gone. Just dead quiet.
All in all, Wren decided that she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed, and neither could Ferdie, from the looks of him. He was curled up in the same exact spot he’d fallen asleep in, contoured perfectly against the bend in her legs.
There were too many feelings weighing her down. What she needed was to disassociate even further; yes, that would be the ticket. But she found herself getting distracted upon resuming the show. Not even suspiciously hot bakers competing in American Gladiator–style games, delivering towering cakes across long balance beams, could wrangle her brain. She needed something even more brain-dead. And that’s when she remembered Instagram.
She began scrolling. Here were a few photos of the wedding from friends of friends. People out at breweries. Visiting the zoo with their kids. A “get ready with me” reel. Soon she was absorbing all kinds of kooky misinformation about vaccines and food dye from the momfluencers, but she didn’t care. Bring it on. Frosted Flakes leads to kids with low IQ? Sure, why not? Formula linked to colic? If you say so. She wanted more. Maybe she would become one of them and hide her pain behind a baseless campaign against Froot Loops.
The edges of her vision went dark and she lost all track of time and sense of reality, exactly as intended.
Until she saw something that caught her eye. Immediately, she called Charlie, whom she’d been texting on and off with most of the previous night—which just happened to be Charlie’s wedding night. She was a real one.
“Hi,” she said glumly when her friend answered.
“I was just thinking about you. You doing OK?”
“What, re Arthur? I’m fine. I’m barely thinking about it.”
“You should really call him,” Charlie said with concern. “He keeps texting me, begging me to let him know if you’re OK. I’ve said you’re fine, but—”
“He’s just some guy, Charlie. Some guy I’ve been casually hooking up with. For ten years. Now, believe it or not, I didn’t call you to talk about that.”
A pause. Wren waited to see if Charlie would let this go or if she would have to be steamrolled, which was never an easy task. They were both stubborn, so stubborn, in fact, that they’d never even once agreed on who wasmorestubborn throughout their entire friendship. An eternal stalemate. Finally, a small sigh came through from the other end of the line. Charlie always sighed like that when she knew Wren was about to pull some bullshit. “OK, what is it, then?”
“I called to tell you that…we are so back.”
“What? Who’s back?”
“FORD THE RIVER. I just saw on Instagram. They kicked off a huge reunion tour a few weeks ago.”
