“What do you need?” Jaime asked.
I shook my head. Three hundred of our closest friends and family members would be arriving within the hour. Save for the ones the ex had already warned off. There was no fixing this.
“Do you want me to get your mom?” Emme asked.
“No,” Jaime and I said in unison. I admired my mother butmaternalorcomfortingwere not words anyone would use to describe her.
“Do you want a giant bowl of liquor and an axe?” Grace asked.
“How about a giant bowl of liquor and a quick exit?” Audrey asked.
“Something like that,” I whispered.
“We’ve got you,” Emme said.
I sobbed then, loud and hysterical and shattered.
My friends closed in around me, one wrapping a robe around my shoulders, another pushing a bottle into my hand and saying “Drink” with a firmness that wouldn’t be swayed, a third plucking the pins from my hair while another gathered up the gown and got it out of sight. Not that I could see much through this uncontrollable downpour of tears.
“He can fuck right off.” That was Emme.
“He never deserved her.” Audrey.
“He’d better hope I don’t get my hands on him.” Grace, ever feral.
“While you plot his dismemberment, I’m going downstairs to—to handle everything. I’ll talk to your mom and stepdad too.”
Something about Jaime’s carefully worded announcement, abouthandlingmy ruination, tore through me harder than anything the ex said this afternoon. I brought the bottle to my mouth and tipped my head back, not caring whether the vodka burned my throat or dribbled down my chin or smudged my lipstick.
None of it mattered.
I didn’t have to be perfect anymore, and that came as a strange sort of parting gift. A gift I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. But I’d been fond of perfect. I’d liked that look for me. And I’d played by the rules of perfect. I’d done everything right.
And none of it mattered.
chapterone
Shay
Students will be able to do battle with attorneys, cow trucks, and pirates.
“You have to sign for a letter.”
I blinked up at Jaime from my cocoon on her sofa, day drunk and dressed in three-day-old pajamas. Two weeks after being left at the altar, I was at least slightly drunk most of the time but I didn’t cry constantly, which seemed like an improvement.
That, or evidence of dehydration. I wasn’t sure.
“But why?” I asked.
She scooped her long, silky brown hair up and tied it in a ponytail. “I don’t know, doll. I tried to do it for you but the dude asked for ID.”
It took me a minute to scrape myself off the sofa. The door was quite the journey for me. I’d only ventured outside the warehouse-turned-loft apartment Jaime shared with three other women a handful of times since everything fell apart on my wedding day.
The first time I pulled myself together enough to leave the apartment was to chop off six inches of hair—hair I’d spent nearly two years growing out for the perfect wedding look—and then take my natural blonde to rose gold.
I had no specific reason for wanting shoulder-length pink hair. I couldn’t explain it. All I knew was I didn’t want to see the old version of me in the mirror anymore.
That was what led me to the tattoo. Much more permanent than changing up my hair but I’d wanted it for years, and now I needed a visible reminder that whoever I had been before this disaster wasn’t the me of today.
