June 2025 #3
Nate had been on the couch, tapping at his laptop like always, when he saw Carly open the text and look stricken.
He’d hurried to organize a last-minute celebration at the house, ordering Domino’s and opening multiple bottles of Trader Joe’s wine.
Nate hadn’t ruined Carly’s birthday by saying a single disparaging thing about her boyfriend.
He had waited until the next morning.
He’s your boss. Aside from this being completely unethical, he’s not treating you right, Nate had insisted. Why do you only see him when it’s convenient for him?
Nate just didn’t understand. He’d never worked a corporate job; he was passionate about his start-up, sure, but he answered only to himself.
Carly followed Anna to the bar, trying not to think of the judgmental look on Nate’s face as he’d walked away from her.
“Good for you, switching groups so that you and Thomas can date openly! The whole secret-affair thing was starting to get old.” Anna swayed a little in her espadrilles as she poured them each another drink. “What did he say when you told him about your plan? He must have been so happy!”
“Oh, um—I haven’t. Told Thomas, I mean.” Carly took a quick sip of her margarita, which was so strong and tart that it burned her throat.
“Thomas thinks you’re going back to Global Strategy? And he’s okay with it?” Anna asked, surprised.
“I may have insinuated that I had another job lined up.” In fact, Carly had told her boyfriend that she was joining Nate’s start-up. She’d just wanted Thomas to get off her back about Google until she sorted things out with HR.
Anna bit her lip. “Carly…maybe you should have talked to Thomas before you made that decision.”
“I didn’t want to make him feel guilty,” Carly replied, instantly defensive. “If we disclose our relationship to Google’s HR and are in separate groups, then there’s no wrongdoing.”
Anna blinked in surprise. “Oh my god. You love him, don’t you?”
Carly stared down at the ground so she wouldn’t have to look Anna in the eye. She and Thomas hadn’t said those three words, but that was all right; they were taking things slow. She caught herself daydreaming about him during class, imagining their future with terrifying clarity.
They would both work at Google for a while, traveling together (to conferences for work, to Asia and Europe for fun), then move in together, settling down.
She would bring Thomas to Texas to meet her family, and he would bring her to his mother in Atlanta.
He would propose on a beach somewhere, the wind ruffling his hair.
“I can’t believe it,” Anna said wonderingly. “Carly Madison Miller, the woman who always claimed that love was a hoax, has fallen in love at last.”
I said that love was a lie, Carly thought. Aloud, she said, “I can’t explain what it is about Thomas. I just…” She trailed off, and Anna shook her head.
“Poor Nate.”
“What do you mean poor Nate?” Carly asked.
“Oh—I just mean poor Nate that you’re not working on his app! He kept saying that he needed someone with your business brain to keep things in order.” Anna waved at a friend across the party, murmured an excuse, then disappeared.
Carly lingered near the table of drinks, her brain humming a bit from the margaritas.
She couldn’t stop thinking of what Anna had said.
Maybe you should have talked to Thomas. Carly reached for her phone and pulled up the Caltrain schedule.
There was a train up to San Francisco in twenty minutes.
She called Thomas, but it rang through to voicemail.
Before she could second-guess herself, Carly was requesting an Uber to the Caltrain station. She didn’t even tell any of her housemates that she was bailing on the party; she just left, carrying nothing but her small crossbody purse.
She’d only been to Thomas’s apartment in the Marina a couple times, usually on weekends when they’d spent the afternoon drinking at the Tipsy Pig.
The forty-five-minute commute to the city was just long enough for her to realize how drunk she was.
She watched the cities of the Peninsula pass in a blur, trying not to feel dizzy.
When she knocked at the door to Thomas’s apartment, a bleary-eyed guy in shorts answered. One of Thomas’s two roommates, the IP lawyer—or was this the product manager at Facebook? Carly couldn’t tell them apart.
“I’m here to see Thomas.” Carly pushed past the roommate, whose expression shifted from bemusement to sudden panic.
“Thomas isn’t here,” the guy protested, but Carly was already picking her way over stray shoes and an abandoned surfboard toward Thomas’s room. She heard his voice on the other side of the door; he must be on the phone.
“Thomas? Sorry to show up without warning—” Carly pushed open the door and swallowed, going utterly still.
He was there, all right. In bed with another girl.
Carly couldn’t move. She just stood there, immobile, taking in the scene before her in the semidarkness—the girl’s expensively highlighted hair cascading down the pillow, the makeup smudged around her eyes.
The trail of clothes abandoned on the floor: Thomas’s khaki shorts, the girl’s turquoise bra.
The girl sat up in bed, unselfconsciously letting the sheets fall to her bare waist. Carly averted her gaze.
“What the hell?” Carly asked, though it came out as a whisper. “You cheated on me?”
Thomas rose from bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. “Come on, Carly,” he began, in the indulgent tone you might use with a toddler throwing a tantrum. “Let’s not overreact, okay? You didn’t exactly tell me you were coming—”
“I tried to call, but you didn’t answer! Now I see why!”
Thomas sighed wearily. “Look, I really like hanging out with you, but we never defined what this was. We certainly never said we were exclusive. I’m sorry if you made assumptions otherwise.”
“Hanging out? ” she repeated, incredulous.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” Thomas was saying. “I would hate for things to end on this note.”
The girl in the bed stood and began collecting her discarded clothing, looking away as if she felt embarrassed by this whole confrontation.
Thomas put out a hand to stop her. “Wait, Olivia—please don’t go.” The girl ignored him, shimmying into her miniskirt and re-hooking her bra.
Carly stared at Thomas, her eyes burning. “I came over to tell you that I was switching groups for you! I was about to sign with User Experience. So that we could keep dating without it being a violation of Google’s policies.”
“I thought you had another job lined up, at a friend’s start-up?” Thomas shook his head as if it didn’t matter. “In any case, we aren’t dating. What we’re doing right now is all I have the bandwidth for. I understand if you want something more, but I can’t give it to you.”
There was something automatic about the way he spoke those last two sentences. Carly wondered, suddenly, how many women he’d given this speech to.
Anger coursed through her veins. She focused on that, because as long as she was angry, she didn’t have to face her own heartbreak.
“You’re a selfish, self-centered asshole,” she said crisply, and stormed out the door.
Outside, she made it two blocks before she had to stop and lean against the brick wall of a Starbucks, the same one where she’d met him the night of the booze cruise.
Carly crumpled forward like a paper doll.
Her breaths came in ragged sobs, tears streaming down her face.
The people who walked past—all preppy and well dressed, laughing as they strolled toward bars or apartments—gave her a wide berth, as if her sadness were infectious.
Everything churned in Carly’s stomach at once: the rage, the hurt, the margaritas. The sidewalk seemed to be swaying toward her.
She leaned over, vomiting onto the pavement again and again, until it felt like there was nothing left in her body at all.
June 2025
“Hello?” Carly called out, stepping through the door of Tree Fort. Silence greeted her, the heavy, stale silence of a house whose tenants had all packed up and left.
Carly had been in Texas for the past week.
After she’d found Thomas in bed with someone else, she’d stumbled into the back seat of a cab, asked it to drive her all the way back to Palo Alto, then dialed United.
She must have wept hysterically on the phone, because the airline agent assumed there was a family emergency and booked Carly’s ticket under “special circumstances” instead of charging her the hefty fare for same-day tickets.
Hours later, Carly was on a 6:00 a.m. flight back to Houston, still trembling from the shock of it all.
She’d told her parents that she needed some time at home, that none of her friends were going to graduation that week.
(A lie, but how would her parents know the difference?
She still got her diploma whether or not she walked across the stage.) Baffled by her moodiness, her parents had driven Carly to her grandparents in South Padre.
Carly spent a weekend sitting on the beach, knees pulled up to her chest as she stared out at the waves, feeling so raw and vulnerable that even the soft sand felt abrasive against her skin.
Perhaps it was the low rumble of the surf, echoing behind everything in South Padre like a heartbeat.
Perhaps it was her grandmother’s oversalted cooking, or her gossipy stories about the neighbors, or all the old movies her grandfather insisted on watching.
Whatever the reason, after a few days with them, Carly felt herself returning to equilibrium.
And she saw now that her relationship with Thomas had never been a relationship at all.