Chapter 3
three
. . .
Exit Twenty-Five
HALSTON
There are so many humiliating places to cry. The bathroom at work after your employee drops an entire batch of laminated dough you’ve spent hours making, for instance.
The fitting room the second you take off your clothes and the lighting is so terrible that you see every single vein in your body.
The frozen food aisle of the local grocery store… While holding a family-size bag of pizza rolls and wondering whether emotional collapse counted as family.
Your car outside of your ex-fiancé’s office after discovering he was using his desk for activities definitely not listed in his job description.
But crying on the shoulder of the road off exit twenty-five, within sight of a Wawa sign glowing red like some sort of convenience store lighthouse for women making poor escape decisions ranks unfairly high.
I sit in my car with the doors locked, my hazards blinking, and my forehead pressed to the steering wheel. Every few seconds a car flies by fast enough to rock me despite the sign directly in front of me saying the speed limit is 30 miles-per-hour. At some point, someone honks.
“Thank you, sir,” I whisper after it startles me so aggressively that I swear my spine jumps. “Your feedback is much appreciated.”
My phone buzzes in my lap.
Marley.
I answer it before the second ring.
“Are you still in the car?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Doors locked?”
“Yeah.”
“Location on?”
“Yes, Marley.”
“Still near the Wawa?”
Oliver’s voice grumbles on the other line. “We’re watching her location right now, Mar. She’s still there.”
“Unless the Wawa is following me,” I tell her anyway as I look through the windshield at the sign.
“Okay, good.”
“Marley?” I ask with a sigh.
“Yeah?”
“I’m really embarrassed.” I sit with it, letting it seep into my bones. Embarrassment. Shame. Every name in the book.
She pauses for a moment, and when she speaks, her voice is softened in that way that makes me want to cry again. “I know, hon.”
“I dropped my ring into his coffee.”
Another pause.
“You did what?”
“His iced Americano. Technically, it was in a mug first. A monogrammed one. It felt symbolic somehow.”
“Halston,” she says firmly.
“What?”
“That is the hottest thing you’ve ever done.”
A laugh bursts out of me so suddenly that I nearly cough. “It didn’t feel hot, it felt deranged.”
“History is written by deranged women with good instincts.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“I think it is.”
I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and immediately regret not having tissues. I could walk to the Wawa sitting in front of me, but that would mean leaving my car on the side of the road and if my bad luck continues… I don’t want to think about it.
Instead, my center console is packed with lip gloss tubes, a few crumpled-up gas-station receipts, a pair of earrings, and a little packet of crushed saltines from some takeout soup I had back in March. But no tissues.
My personal life feels like a junk drawer with cup holders.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“With Oliver. Ten minutes away.”
“Is he mad?” I wince.
“At Grant?”
“At me.”
Marley makes a sound of pure disgust. “Why would Oliver be mad at you?”
“I don’t know. Because he has to come get me.”
She clicks her tongue. “He likes being useful. It feeds his Victorian orphan soul.”
“I heard that,” Oliver says faintly in the background.
“You were meant to,” she responds. But to me, she says, “He’s not mad.”
“He always sounds mad. He sounded mad at a baby last week.” It’s true.
“The baby threw a lime wedge at me,” Oliver says.
I can feel Marley’s eye roll through the phone. “You were behind the bar. The baby understood the setting.”
Oliver has a few parents that come in during the day to talk, but he has a firm no-babies rule past 4pm.
I laugh again, but a sob breaks through.
“Hey,” she says. “We’re almost there.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing or I’ll punch your boob.”
“I made you leave work.”
“I was designing email graphics for a dentist who believes beige is a brand identity. You saved me, I promise.”
“I made Oliver leave the bar,” I wail.
“Oliver leaves the bar all the time.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He does if someone he loves runs out of gas during a betrayal fugue.”
My chin trembles. Betrayal fugue. Sounds accurate.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“I thought maybe Florida.”
“To your dad?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you call him?”
I look out my window. A silver sedan rushes by me, and then a large pickup with truck nuts and a don’t tread on me sticker and that American flag Punisher symbol that drives me crazy because they very clearly don’t actually get The Punisher at all and—
I stop myself.
“No,” I say finally.
She does not ask why, which is one of the many reasons I love her.
She knows not all parents are emergency contacts, even when they technically love you, and you love them.
My dad loves me. I know he does. Eddy Smith is a big-hearted, sunburned, flour-covered man who sends me photos of weird bread experiments and once mailed me a birthday card six weeks late because he’d “put it somewhere safe,” which in his case meant inside a cookbook he did not open until August.
But calling him meant saying the words out loud to a man who had left a family behind, even if he had done it with regret and Christmas presents and Florida sunshine.
Calling him meant being his sad daughter, and I couldn’t do that yet.
Not when I’m already a sad ex-fiancée, a sad bakery owner, and a sad woman near Wawa. There are only so many tragic identities one person can wear before the outfit gets far too busy and they need to take something off.
“I couldn’t go home,” I say.
“Then don’t.” She says it with a finality that makes me close my eyes and lean my head against the headrest. “You don’t have to decide anything today. Nothing at all,” she continues. “Not where you’re sleeping or how to get your things. Oliver and I can deal with that.”
“I have wedding appointments.”
“We’ll cancel them.”
“I made deposits.”
“We’ll deal with them.”
“My dress is at home.”
“We’ll burn it.”
I sigh. “It was really expensive, Marley.”
“Fine. Then we’ll sell it, and then burn something else.”
“Grant?” I know that’s who she’s picturing.
There’s a pause and a muffled voice. “Oliver said we can’t discuss felonies over the phone.”
“He’s so controlling,” I whisper.
“He has a strong moral compass,” she adds. “He keeps it in the same drawer as his emergency bail cash.”
“The cash is for plumbing disasters,” he groans in the background.
I picture them in Oliver’s truck. Marley is in the passenger seat, most likely turned halfway sideways with one sneaker on the dash until Oliver snaps at her to get it down or she’ll kill herself in an accident.
Oliver is driving with both hands on the wheel, his jaw tight, wearing the expression of a man on his way to fix a situation he’ll do everything he can to pretend he doesn’t care deeply about.
It breaks something in me. Something good. Something kinder.
“I don’t want you guys to see me like this,” I admit.
“Like what?”
“Stupid, I think.”
“Oh, babe. We’ve all seen each other in these moments.”
“Not me!” Oliver calls.
“I brought him a croissant,” I sniffle.
“I know.”
“I was apologizing.”
“You never told me what you were apologizing for.”
I take a deep breath, hating the fact that I’m letting Grant’s voice slither into my brain. “I showed him sketches for a cookie line I want to try. Fantasy maps. I was icing sugar cookies the other day and thought they would be fun. Maybe we can even have a D&D night at Oliver’s—”
“No,” Oliver grumbles, cutting me off.
I continue on. “They had little kingdoms. Rivers and castles and mountain ranges. I thought they’d be really cute. Fun. Something for nerdy people who want dessert to taste expensive, you know?”
“They sound amazing,” she praises.
My voice drops. “He called them adorable.”
Marley inhales.
I laugh without humor. “Right?”
“Adorable in a good way or a condescending way?”
“Like he wanted to pat me on the head and buy me a far less embarrassing hobby. I got upset, and he said I was making it bigger than it needed to be. So this morning I made him an apology croissant.”
Marley is silent for so long that I look down and start picking at my cardigan.
She sighs. “I want you to listen to me very carefully.”
I mumble.
“You making something beautiful for someone who made you feel small does not make you stupid.”
My eyes brim with tears.
“It makes you hopeful. And he was lucky to be loved by someone with so much hope.”
I press my fist to my mouth in an attempt to keep myself calm, but it doesn’t work. The sound that leaves me is not pretty.
Marley stays on the phone through it all. She doesn’t hush me, or tell me to breathe through it.
She doesn’t try to patch the hole inside of me with motivational quotes or even threats. I know they’ll come later. She just stays there, on the other end of the phone as they draw nearer, breathing as I cry near exit twenty-five with my hazards blinking like a tiny roadside nervous breakdown.
The dark truck pulls onto the shoulder behind me, and I lift my head.
Oliver’s truck. Big, navy blue, and old enough to make concerning noises and yet it’s somehow always maintained with the kind of care that Oliver pretends not to give to anything.
The hazard lights come on, and the driver’s door opens.
Oliver gets out first, his black jeans ripped at the knees and his dark t-shirt wrinkled under his open flannel, despite it being warm enough outside to make the air look just a little blurry.
His hair is messy, like he ran his hands through it the entire drive, and his expression is exactly what I expected it to be. Grim and irritated.
Marley jumps out of the passenger side a second later. She’s shorter than me, with dark hair twisted up in a claw clip and sunglasses pushed to the top of her head. She wears cutoffs with a faded red tank, and the look of someone who’s more than ready to ruin someone’s entire bloodline.