Chapter 35
Carly
I make it to the parking lot before I break.
One minute I’m walking fast enough that my heels wobble, one hand clamped around the stupid little clutch I brought for this stupid wedding, the other trying to hold my dress up out of the way, and the next I can’t breathe.
It hits me all at once.
The church. The reception. Aaron’s face. Grayson’s face. The look in his eyes when he said he saw my phone.
Like I was filth.
Like I was a liar.
Like I was some opportunistic little bitch who climbed into his house and his bed and his daughter’s life because it was convenient.
Like I was Halsey.
My lungs lock up.
I bend over beside my car, one hand braced on the hood, and suck in a breath that doesn't feel like it gets all the way down. My mascara is probably halfway down my face by now. My nose is running. My chest hurts. Somewhere behind me, a car door slams, and I flinch so hard I nearly drop my keys.
I cannot do this here.
I fumble the car open, get in, and just sit there for a second, gripping the steering wheel so hard my palms start to ache. Is this why he wanted to drive separately?
“Okay,” I whisper, even though there is nobody there. “Okay. I’m okay.”
I am very much not okay.
By the time I pull up outside Zoe’s place, I’m crying hard enough that I'm struggling to see clearly. I barely remember the drive over. My head is pounding from the hangover, my throat burns, and the zipper at the side of my dress feels like it’s cutting into me.
I don’t even knock properly. I slap at the door once, then again, then Zoe yanks it open with a confused little laugh already forming on her mouth that dies the second she sees me.
“Oh my God.” She grabs my arms. “Carly? What happened?”
And that’s it. That’s the end of my thin, trembling little thread of composure.
I make some horrible sound and fold in on myself.
Zoe gets me inside, shuts the door, drags me to the couch, and I’m crying too hard to explain any of it. Full-body crying, struggling to breathe, my face hot and my hands shaking and my chest spasming like my heart is trying to claw its way out.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Zoe crouches in front of me and pushes my hair back from my face. “Breathe first. Talk second. Come on.”
I try. I really do. But every breath comes in too fast, too shallow. My vision starts going spotty around the edges.
“I c-can’t—”
“Yes, you can.” Her voice sharpens, stern but gentle. “Look at me. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. Again.”
I do it badly, then slightly less badly, and then badly again because the words smash into my mind like a truck.
He thinks I used him.
Zoe’s brow furrows, her hands dropping to my arms, squeezing. “Did Grayson do something to you?”
I shake my head so hard it makes me dizzy. “No. No, he—” My voice cracks and I start crying harder. “He t-thinks I—”
“Carly.”
I drag in one ragged breath, then another. And I tell her. I tell her everything in ugly, broken pieces.
About Grayson being weird at the church, about him sitting beside me on the pew like a stranger, about me asking what was wrong and him saying, Let’s just get through this. That’s what you want, right?
Zoe’s face gets darker and darker as I go.
I tell her about the reception, about him saying he saw my phone last night, the apartment text. I tell her about how he decided from that one thing that I’d been using him all along.
“F-for the house,” I say, my voice wobbling so hard I can barely hear myself. “For a place to live. A-and for the wedding. Like I just—like I just let him think all of this was real because it was useful to me.”
Zoe’s mouth drops open. “Are you kidding me?”
I laugh, except it comes out broken and wet. “I wish.”
“And you told him that’s not what happened?”
“Yes.” My hands fly up helplessly. “I tried. I-I tried to explain that I signed the lease before—before all of this got…” My throat closes.
Bigger. Real. Important. “I tried to explain, and he kept cutting me off, and then Aaron came over and made it worse, and Grayson nearly hit him, and I had to pull him away, and then he just—”
My phone buzzes beside me on the couch.
I freeze.
Zoe glances at it. “Is that him?”
I don’t know why my stomach drops like maybe, maybe this will be the message where he says he’s sorry, where he says he overreacted, where he says come home and we’ll talk.
My hands are shaking so badly that I almost drop the phone when I pick it up.
Grayson:
It’s over. I’m done.
That’s all it says. There is no explanation, no softness, no room left for me to try to explain.
Something tears wide open inside me. The tears that never really stopped hit harder.
This is worse. It’s instant and violent and I fold in half around the phone with this awful sound ripping out of me, and suddenly I can’t breathe again.
Snot, tears, hiccuping gasps, mascara, all of it.
Every ugly thing a body can do when it’s hurting too much.
“Oh, Carly.” Zoe is on the couch beside me in a second, hauling me against her. “Oh, fuck him. Fuck him for that.”
“He’s s-shutting me out,” I sob into her shoulder. “He won’t even let me explain.”
“I know.”
“I don’t—don't even want that a-apartment.” The words come out mangled. “I don’t care about the apartment, Zoe, I don’t care, I just—I want to f-fix it. I want to go back and fix it and I c-can’t. I just want him.”
She rubs a hand up and down my back while I shake apart all over her couch. “Okay. Okay. Then the apartment is just an apartment. We’ll deal with the apartment later.”
“I-I want to break the lease.”
“Then we’ll look at that.”
“I-I don’t care if I lose money.”
“We’ll look at it,” she repeats firmly, because I’m spiraling and she knows it.
I pull back just enough to look at her. “W-what about my job?”
“Worst case? You don’t go back there.”
A fresh wave of panic crashes over me. “N-no, no, that’s my job.”
“I know.”
“I worked s-so hard for that promotion,” I choke, gasping between the words.
“I know.”
“And Penelope—” My voice shreds on her name. “I can’t just—just disappear on her. I can’t do that to her. She’ll think she did something wrong. She blames herself. Gray—Gray said—”
“I know.”
Penelope is probably going to ask where I am, and Grayson is probably going to tell her something clipped and final, and she is going to carry it around in her little chest like it’s her fault somehow, and I hate him for this, for shutting this down, for closing me out like it was easy.
And I still love him. That’s the worst part. I love him so much I can barely sit upright under the weight of it.
Zoe gets up long enough to grab tissues and water. She peels my clutch away from me like I’m a toddler holding a knife, takes my phone before I can stare at the text again, and comes back with a blanket even though it’s not cold.
This is so much worse than the breakup with Aaron. That was nothing in comparison to the way my chest feels like it's been gouged by an axe.
“You can stay here,” she says, matter-of-fact, like there is no universe where I would be anywhere else. “As long as you need. We’ll make the couch work again. It's okay.”
I nod because speaking feels impossible.
“And if you don’t want to go back to Sparkks right now, don’t.”
I stare at her.
She shrugs one shoulder. “I can put you on barista shifts at the shop until you figure out your life. It won’t pay anywhere near as much, obviously, and I make no promises about the aprons being cute, but it’s something.”
That nearly breaks me all over again. “Zoe—”
“Don’t be proud right now. I’m offering. Take the lifeline.”
My chin wobbles. “You’d do that?”
She gives me the driest look in human history. “Carly. Obviously, I’d do that.”
A sound escapes me that is half sob, half laugh.
She squeezes my knee. “It’s not forever. It’s just until you can think straight.”
I take the water she offers because she keeps glaring at me until I do. I kick my shoes off. At some point, she helps me unzip my dress and she forces me into her newly remodeled shower, telling me I need to wash the mascara off my face and neck.
And as I stand there in the scalding water, willing myself to do anything, to wash, to move, something, all I can do is think about what happened.
Nothing about this feels okay. Nothing about it feels fixable. It feels like standing in the wreckage after the crash, staring at all the twisted metal and wondering if I can somehow put it all back together with my bare hands.
And I can’t. I can’t put it all back together.
That’s the worst part. Not that I’m losing him or Penelope. Not even that I’m losing the life I had started building.
It’s that there is nothing I can do now except feel it happening.