“You dumped me!”
Robby glanced over at Taylor, and then decided to keep talking, anyway. “I didn’t even like her, okay? She was just … there.”
I felt a glimmer of empathy for Taylor’s ears, hearing that. “You realize that makes it so much worse.”
“At a hard time in my life, she was better than nothing, okay? That’s all she was.”
Did it feel good to win like that in front of Taylor?
Undecided.
I mean, was anybody really winning in this situation? “You realize she’s standing right there, right?” I said.
“That’s your fault!” Robby said. And then he said something that hit me in just the right way at the right time: “You wouldn’t let me in!”
At those words, I paused. Every now and then, something really, genuinely true cuts through all the chaos of life and just gets your full attention. “I wouldn’t let you in?” I echoed, more to myself than to him. It was like somebody had flipped the lights on in a shadowy room. “Oh my God, Bobby. You’re right.”
“Stop calling me Bobby,” Robby said.
“You’re right, though. You really are.”
Robby frowned. “I am?”
It was like I was seeing him for the first time. “I wouldn’t let you in. When I was working and missed your birthday party? And when I had to drop out of our getaway weekend at the last minute? And when I lost the bracelet you gave me? When I ‘worked all the time’？ When I was ‘no fun’？ That was me not letting you in.”
Possibly also when I was a “bad kisser.” But I wasn’t going to dignify those words by speaking them out loud.
Robby glanced at Taylor, like What’s going on?
She ignored him.
I went on. “I thought you were blaming me, but you were just telling the truth. I thought if we were sleeping together, that was love. But you were so right. I didn’t know what love was.”
I thought about Jack. I thought about the piggyback ride he gave me back from the river. I thought about what it felt like to make him laugh. I thought about how I rooted for him every time he tried to shoot something into the kitchen trash and missed. I thought about the buzz of fear that went through my body when he somersaulted off Clipper, as if Jack breaking his neck might break mine, too. I thought about the full-body bliss of waking up in his bed, tangled under his weight. I thought of the crackling agony in my body as I’d looked for him in vain that last night to say goodbye. I thought of the roiling, dark-green jealousy just now at watching Kennedy Monroe slathering her undeserving self all over him.
Now I knew.
I nodded at Robby. “You were right. I didn’t let you in.”
Robby just stared. How often in life do you accuse an ex-girlfriend of something and just … watch her agree with you?
“I mean,” I said, looking him up and down, “you didn’t deserve to be let in. So it’s a good thing in the end. But thank you.”
Robby was so befuddled, his mouth hung open. “For what?”
“For showing me what love isn’t,” I said.
And I shoved my door closed and flipped the dead bolt.
Twenty-Seven
THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, my phone rang, and when I checked it, it read: POSSIBLE SPAM.
I answered anyway, if that gives you a sense of how lonely I was.
But it wasn’t a telemarketer.
It was Jack Stapleton.
“Hey,” he said when I picked up, and I knew him from one syllable.
I could also hear he was grinning.
Then suddenly he was FaceTiming me—me, still in my nightgown with hair pointing in ten different directions—and I could see he was grinning.
“Did you miss me?” he asked, looking pleased with himself.
I was distracted by the reflection of myself in the phone. “No,” I said, pawing at my hair.
“So nice to see my favorite nightgown again.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“Important business.”
“How do you even have my number?”
“I sweet-talked it out of Kelly.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The point is,” Jack said, “I’m calling to tell you about the plan we came up with to catch the stalker.”
“You came up with a plan to catch the stalker?”
Jack nodded. “A sting operation. To catch her in the act. And then haul her down to the clink. And then scare, pressure, and cajole her into, you know, not murdering you.”
“That’s the plan you came up with?”