“We?” I scan my mind for something better to say, some words that will pull him out of this quiet damage-control monotone and remind him that I’m here and I’m his, and even though this is genuinely shit, we can figure out a plan together.
But Alec speaks first. “Please take care, Gigi.”
Blank inside, I stare at the wall. “I… wait. Alec? That’s it?”
The other end of the line is oddly flat.
He fucking hung up.
Pulling the phone away from my ear, I stare at my home screen, a photo I took of him playing Mario Kart, his tongue sticking out, trapped between his perfect, grinning teeth. Inside I am glowing—I mean, I am positively incandescent—with rage. “Is he fucking serious?”
“What just happened?”
I’m trying to relax my jaw so that I can get more words out than the string of curses that want to rip free, but I can’t. I just shake my head again. “Holy shit.”
“Georgie, what?”
“He’s going back to London,” I say.
“Okay?” She’s trying to keep me from blowing a fuse. “That makes sense, right? He probably wants to get his team and family together.”
“He told me he was rescinding his permission to print his account and to—and I quote—‘please take care,’ and then he hung up.”
“He just hung up?”
I look at her and nod.
Eden lets out a low, violent “No he fucking did not.”
“He sure did.”
She stands. “Be right back, I need to put all of my West Midlands shirts in the trash.”
“That is not what we’re doing here,” I say to her, struggling to pull my composure together. “We are going to give him more grace than he deserves.” But then I look at my Batphone one more time, turn it off, walk into my bathroom, and drop it in the trash.
* * *
My mom is beside herself with worry when I get to the house, but I promise her that I will drink an entire bottle of wine and unload everything if I can only have an hour to go pound the pavement alone.
I pull on my running shoes and bolt from the porch with angry music blasting in my ears. Eden made me a playlist titled Men Are Trash, and I admit, it’s exactly what I needed to channel this confusion and hurt into something kinetic. I didn’t stretch first—no doubt I’ll regret it, but not nearly as much as I’ll regret letting my subconscious guide me two and a half miles down the road to the Kim family’s old house.
It’s been repainted. No longer a pale yellow house with a soft patch of grass, it is now a rich cream with olive-green trim, a xeriscaped yard, and two Teslas parked out front. For as much as the house looks brand-new, the shape of the front window is the same, and I can imagine sitting on the soft velvet couch just inside, can hear the slapping echo of Alec’s skateboard down the sun-warped street.
My brain tunnels through time. At this exact moment yesterday, I was getting ready for the gala. And less than twenty-four hours ago, Alec was cleaning my skin with body wash and his big hands, telling me about the place he wanted to take me for dinner on our first night in London next month.
I haven’t cried yet, but before I can actively hold myself together, I’m bursting into tears, letting it all out on the dashed yellow line in the middle of Pearl Street.
What the fuck just happened?
I tried to do the right thing, tried to protect everyone, and ended up losing my job and my new boyfriend in a single afternoon.
My life has emptied of meaning so suddenly that it almost feels like I’m closing in on myself, collapsing inward. Sitting at the curb, I stare at a line of ants moving past the round toe of my shoe. Slowly my eyes lose focus until the ants turn into a blurred black line, waving on the concrete, doing nothing but moving forward one step at a time.
* * *
I return to my parents’ place at least two hours later than I’d planned, to find my mother on the porch with her phone in her hand, Eden standing next to her. They march toward me, lectures ready, words overlapping.
I let them have this. I didn’t take my phone. I was just dumped and fired. I didn’t notice how much time had passed on the curb until the sun was gone and I realized my old iPod had played the playlist at least three times through.
They gather me inside, depositing me on the couch. Some food materializes. Eden is on one side of me, Mom on the other, and I hate this familiar comfort.
Even though we did this exact same thing only six months ago, this time it feels infinitely worse.
Twenty