“I don’t want to lose you,” Taylor said, her voice trembling now, too.
“He’s going to leave you,” I said. “He’s left every woman he’s ever been with. Did you know that? He’s always the dumper—never the dumpee. And then you’ll come to me and beg me to forgive you, but I won’t. You want to know why? Because I can’t. Because certain broken things can never be repaired.”
I was ready for that to be my exit line. I was ready to abandon her there in the driveway with only the echo of those words remaining. I started to walk away.
But she called after me, “You’re wrong.”
I turned back.
“He’s not going to leave me. He dumped all those other women because he hadn’t found the right one.”
Wow. The hubris. “You think you’re the one?”
“I know for sure that you weren’t.”
Oof.
And here, right here, is the trouble with being close to other people. The better they know you, the better they can hurt you.
“He never loved you,” she said then, “because you wouldn’t let him.”
How dare she side with him? “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Ask him sometime. He tried.”
It didn’t surprise me that Robby tried to make himself out to be the victim. But it did surprise me that Taylor would believe him.
She must have really needed to see me as the problem.
Then she shrugged and fixed her eyes on mine. “You’re so sure it’s all Robby’s fault.”
“Yeah! And you should be, too!”
“But you won’t see your part in it.”
How was this happening? She was supposed to stand up for me. She was supposed to feel outraged and wronged on my behalf. That’s what best friends were for.
“How can you do this?” I asked, my voice sinking. “You were my best friend.”
But Taylor shook her head. “I was never your best friend. I was your work friend. And the fact that you don’t know the difference? That’s your whole problem right there.”
Twelve
ANYHOO.
That’s how I wound up moving to Jack Stapleton’s parents’ five-hundred-acre cattle ranch—against all my better judgment.
Not that I had a choice.
But compared to living next door to Taylor, it suddenly didn’t seem so bad.
Compared to staying in our fourplex with its papier-maché walls, eating cereal in my kitchen, and listening to Robby and The Worst Person Ever making waffles on the other side, compared to overhearing the two of them watching horror movies on her sofa, or ordering takeout, or going at it all night in her bedroom … compared to all that, moving in with The Destroyer was definitely an upgrade.
I called my landlord from the car after that fight with Taylor to cancel my lease.
I’d find a new place online and rent it sight unseen. I’d hire movers to pack up my entire apartment, dirty laundry and all, and haul it away.
I’d leave on assignment, and then I’d never set foot in that apartment again.
And I’d make sure my next rental had a working fireplace so I could unpack, find all the things Taylor had given me over the years—the Wonder Woman T-shirt, the journal with the YOU ARE MAGIC glitter cover, the picture book of the world’s cutest hedgehogs—and throw them in the fire one by one to burn them all to ashes.
A purge. A cleansing. A new frigging start.
* * *
THE MORNING JACK and I moved out to the Stapletons’ ranch, it was Jack who was in a bad mood.
Like he was the one who’d earned one.
Gone was that aggressively nonchalant vibe he wore most of the time like a cologne. His shoulders were tense as he drove, his jaw was tight, and his blood pressure—I swear, I could read it from across the car—was elevated.
He barely even spoke to me the entire drive.
It was the loudest quiet I’d ever heard.
It was only then, on the interstate, in Jack’s passenger seat, that I realized Taylor had done me a favor, in a way: She had turned going to Jack’s ranch into a kind of escape.
It wasn’t the escape I’d been wanting.
But it would do for now.
That realization brightened my mood quite a bit.
By the time we got to the Brazos bridge, and Jack got out to walk across, he looked almost nauseated. And by the time we pulled up to the house itself, the air around him was positively brittle with misery.
An escape for me. But maybe the opposite for him.
Though Kelly hadn’t been kidding about House Beautiful. It was a 1920’s Spanish-style hacienda with a red-tiled roof and pink bougainvillea blossoming everywhere. We parked on the gravel drive, and as I stepped out of the car a breeze brushed past us and fluttered the sundress around my bare knees.