“I was kidding!” he repeated.
“It wasn’t funny. Isn’t it obvious that something like that would hurt my feelings? Do you even care?”
“You have feelings? News to me.” He shrugged and flicked the turn signal once before he moved back into the left lane. The car’s engine roared up and then kept revving higher.
“Of course I have feelings!” Right now, what I felt was rage. I also felt insulted and I was also trying not to cry. “Your ‘joke’ was terrible. Is that what you really think?” I asked. I waited, because what he was about to say could have been the end of everything.
But Grant didn’t answer. I looked out the window again but I still didn’t see the hot pavement or the other motorists. I saw five years speeding past, five years of us dating, sleeping together, moving in together. This car had both our names on it, even if it was “his.” We’d both signed the lease on our house, too. We’d bought furniture, and maybe it hadn’t been a fifty-fifty split, but we’d each contributed. He had my passwords for all the streaming stuff; I was the emergency contact listed on the documents he'd had to fill out when he got hired. I was the one who’d filled them out for him! After five years, there were so many ways that our lives had become intertwined.
Didn’t that mean something?
We flew past Livernois Avenue and then Linwood Street and traffic got heavier, but he didn’t take his foot off the accelerator, and he cut from lane to lane to get ahead. The back wheels shimmied slightly but he regained control.
“Slow down,” I demanded sharply.
“I want to get out of this car. I don’t want to be stuck with you and your bad attitude for an extra minute.”
“My ‘bad attitude?’ I’m not the one who just—look out!” I yelped, because he’d swerved onto the shoulder to pass a slower vehicle.
“That’s the fast lane!” he yelled at them, looking in the rearview mirror at the road behind us. Then he had to swerve again, because he only saw a truck in front at the last second. “People in this city drive like shit!”
He looked at his lap, where his phone lay. With the way he’d tilted it, I couldn’t see the screen but he must have read something there because he nodded, and his gaze stayed averted from the road for much too long. He typed a reply, too.
“Pay attention! Slow down,” I said, because now I was scared. He was a poor driver (no matter what he thought about his skills and those of others) and he was worse after a few beers (no matter what he thought about being unaffected by drinking). The DUI he’d gotten and his four speeding tickets over the past few years had made our car insurance so expensive that I felt a little ill every time I had to pay it. Those infractions proved to me that he had to be more careful, but Grant wasn’t worried about his skills. He just thought that he had bad luck, because he’d been caught.
We’d had endless arguments about the topic but they’d gotten us nowhere. In fact, he thought thatIwas the bad driver because I’d been rear-ended when I was in high school. That was why, he always told me, it was safer if he was behind the wheel, in thevehicle on which I was currently making the payments but was his.
I didn’t feel anything like safe at the moment, but he shook his head and made a disgusted sound in his throat when he saw me holding onto the door. “You’re fine,” he snapped, and I watched the numbers on the speedometer. Seventy-five. Seventy-eight. Eighty-two. “You know, I’m the one who should be embarrassed,” he continued. “You just showed my friends how crazy you are. They saw for themselves what I’ve had to deal with. They’ve all been asking why I put up with it and they’re telling me to leave you.” He held up his phone so that I could see the notifications, and yes, there were a lot. “They think that I could do a lot better.”
“Go ahead and give it a try!” I told him. “You’ll find out pretty quick that not many other women will put up with your crap.” But I was aware that there were probably a lot who would. He was very good-looking, in a regular-featured, catalog model kind of way. Even features, straight teeth, thick hair, and once upon a time, a body to match all that. But over the last few years, he’d been letting things slide, like skipping the gym to go to a club or skipping the dinner I made to go to a restaurant for a multi-course meal with plenty of drinks. It had gotten to the point that I’d caught him sucking in his stomach as he looked at his profile in the mirror.
A little gut wouldn’t have been enough to dissuade too many women, though, because he did have his looks and he definitely had charm. Wherever we went, he would chat and smile and they smiled back. He made a great first impression andprobably the next few would go well, too. A few months in, maybe they would see how he “forgot” his wallet a lot, how he “didn’t think” to text when he was running late or wasn’t showing up at all. They would realize that time with his boys was the most important thing to him, and they’d have to craft a good answer to his perennial question: “Don’t you want me to have fun?” They’d also learn about what he called “fibs” and I called “lies.” There had been a lot of those in the last five years.
“Are you suggesting that we break up?” he asked me. “You really want to do that, Emerson?”
Yes, of course! Yes, that was what I wanted, because who would want to stay with a guy like this, a guy who flirted with waitresses, a guy who’d gone to a baseball game with his friends last weekend on my birthday, a guy who had just told everyone—
“Grant!Look out!”
But it was already too late when he noticed the line of traffic that had slowed down in our lane. We’d come up on them so fast that there was no way to fully stop. There was also no way to go around, since a tow truck blocked the shoulder and a big rig loomed on our right. The only path led into the back of the RV in front of us, so he yanked the wheel and the tires turned ninety degrees as the brakes shrieked.
He lost control and there was no room to stop. There was no way to avoid the barrier that separated us from the northbound side of the freeway—
And suddenly, my thoughts crystalized. The image of a map flashed into my mind, one that traced the long road of ourrelationship. It included warnings about all the potholes and broken pavement, the detours and dead ends. It was like I could see it perfectly, from where I’d made the wrong turn at the beginning and up to this moment, when the trip would terminate.
For so long, I’d been trying to patch things and steer us in the right direction, but now I saw the answer. I knew exactly what I had to do and it was so obvious that the realization hit me like I’d run straight into a wall.
Which we did. His car crashed into the concrete barrier and then—
Chapter 1
“Next.”
I carefully stepped up to the desk. “Hello,” I said, and the receptionist smiled in a stretched, unhappy way. She already knew why I was standing there.
“Can I have your name?”
“Emerson Mack,” I answered.
