Dahlia couldn’t look at them. She stared just past their shoulder, at the door, at a loss for what to say. She wanted to explain it all better somehow. Explain what they actually meant to her, what this had all meant. She knew she was saying all the wrong things, but all she could hear was Tanner Tavish saying her name for the last time. Maritza, with her kind, sad eyes, telling her a PA would bring her plane ticket soon.
They should have talked about all of this before, she and London, but they hadn’t, and now, when she should have been telling them how much she loved them, all she could taste was her own bitter loss.
“Dahlia.” London tried again, gentler this time, and the audacity of them to be gentle at all with her right now, when she knew she was being awful, was just gut-wrenching. “Don’t run away. Wait with me. Be with me.”
She swallowed.
“You’re braver than this,” London whispered. “Don’t run away.”
Dahlia closed her eyes. There were so many things she could have said.
I’m not braver than this.
I love you.
But what she said was “I think you should go.”
London froze. They stared at her for too many beats, each second feeling too long. Waiting for her to take it back.
“Please, London,” she whispered, the pressure in her head painful now. “I want you to go.”
Their face changed then. They clenched that beautiful jaw and looked down at the floor.
“Fine.” London sighed, and finally, finally, in that heavy puff of air, Dahlia heard goodbye. “Your self-fulfilling prophecy has finally come true. Congratulations, Dahlia. You’ve disappointed me, too.”
Dahlia blinked.
Her bones felt hollow, like a bird’s. On the verge of breaking, pulverizing into dust.
London took a step back. They shook their head one last time.
“Have fun rooting for Lizzie.”
No, she wanted to cry. That wasn’t—
London walked toward the door.
Frantically, she tried to compartmentalize this in her brain, the last time she would see London Parker. But all that flashed behind her eyes were error messages. Everything felt wrong.
London didn’t look back. The door closed behind them, the softest of clicks. Of course London Parker would not slam doors. They would not shout.
They simply walked away, quiet and steady. Dahlia stared after them, the sudden silence of her hotel room crowding her brain, suffocating and vicious, until her legs gave out and she slumped to the floor, finally alone with her sloppy, half-packed suitcase.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dahlia’s first thought, when she entered her apartment, was that she should cancel cable.
She’d been thinking about doing it forever anyway.
The entire plane ride from LAX to BWI, her brain had been stuck on a loop of memories. Eating ice cream and watching movies on London’s bed, dancing with them at that wedding, ocean breezes streaming through her hair in the car while they rested in the seat beside her. And then a new frame would cut in: the way London looked at her last night. The click of the door when they left. Rinse and repeat.
She had shed all her tears between the time London left her room and the taxi took her to the airport. Time to cut off the loop now. Start a new frame.
Maybe she could apply for deferment for her student loans. It wasn’t a great financial decision, but it would only be for a little while. Everyone did it. Maybe she could get her old job back, or apply for something else at the paper. She had been a solid worker. Maybe they would take her back.
Dahlia’s suitcase slapped the floor as she dropped it next to the door. She walked into her tiny kitchen. Faced its empty cabinets.
For the last few weeks, Dahlia had cooked with the finest ingredients in the world. She had almost started to feel like it was normal, having an endless pantry full of food of the highest quality. It was so bizarre, this experience Dahlia had just had, that standing in her barren kitchen now, she wondered if it had even happened. If she had hallucinated the last month of her life entirely.
Dahlia walked into her bedroom. She curled into a ball on top of the covers without taking off her clothes. She tried to make herself small, as small and unnatural as she felt.
When she woke hours later, all she could think about was how much she missed the hotel.
Eventually, Dahlia got up. She changed her clothes. She would get through this. She just needed to make a plan.
She found a spoon and a half-empty jar of peanut butter in the kitchen and sat on her drooping Ikea couch. Okay, she had missed this rug. Sinking her toes into its high-pile luxury had been the best part of her day, sometimes. It was probably the nicest thing she had bought for herself after the divorce. She’d let David keep almost all their old furniture.