35. Salem
SALEM
Iwoke up in my own bed, and for a second I didn’t know where I was. The ceiling looked too familiar. The light coming through the curtains felt wrong for a hotel room.
Then it all came back at once—the ballroom, the balcony, the city below the windows, and then the text, and then me, storming out like a crazed teenager with a bad report card. At one o'clock in the morning. I left a man standing in a hotel room in a sheet because Lucy sent a text.
I pressed my face into the pillow. It didn’t help, so I pushed myself upright and sat on the edge of the bed.
Yep. October was October after all. I should have seen this coming from the moment I walked into a haunted house and made direct eye contact with a shirtless man in skeleton paint and thought, ‘this seems fine.’ That was the moment.
That was where the chain of events leading to me sitting here in yesterday’s mascara had begun.
I reached for my phone.
I was going to text him.
That was the decision I had arrived at somewhere between three in the morning and now.
This could be cleared up with a single message; I didn’t need to have the full explanation ready.
‘Hey, I don’t know why I did that, I know this wasn’t about your feelings for Lucy’ was enough to start with.
He was a reasonable man. He would be able to accept that as a statement, and I could work my way to an answer.
His name was right there. My thumb hovered.
Two notifications dropped across the top of the screen at the same time.
The bank.
And a tag.
I stared at both of them for a second, sitting there side by side.
I opened the bank email first.
I read it once, quickly, like getting through it faster would make it easier if it wasn’t what I wanted. I expected bad news.
Approved.
The word stayed exactly where it was, steady and unchanging, like it wasn’t something that could be followed by a second email explaining why it had been sent in error. The numbers were there. The terms.
The shop was mine.
I sat with that for two seconds. The shop was mine. I should have been crying happy tears into my coffee. Instead, my chest just sat there, unmoved, because I had approximately four other fires burning. Rowan didn’t know yet, and that alone was a wildfire.
People who care don’t live by omissions.
The line arrived without warning, the way things do when you’ve been avoiding them. Lucy’s words. Aimed at Ethan. About Ethan.
Except they had landed on me.
I had the shop. The thing I had been saving for, dreaming about, and quietly building toward for years. The person who loved me most in the world still didn’t know it existed.
I sat with that for one more second.
Someone tagged me in the comments of Lucy’s new post. Lucy. Of course.
She was sitting somewhere polished—her room, I assumed, because everything about the frame suggested careful curation.
Soft lighting. A backdrop that looked casually assembled.
The camera angled with the precision of someone who had been doing this long enough to know which side was her good side and ensured that was the only side available.
Her expression was soft.
“Okay.” Her voice was quiet and reasonable, the tone of someone being very mature about something that was costing them considerably. “Am I the asshole—”
My stomach dropped.
“—for letting the guy I’ve been seeing participate in a PR relationship for a children’s charity, and being upset that the other woman is trying to steal him away?”
I stared at the screen.
She kept going. Same careful, measured tone. No names, no specifics, just enough detail to paint the picture for anyone looking.
“She knew. She knew what it was.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
She didn’t look like she thought she was overreacting.
“And honestly?” Her voice dropped just slightly, like she was sharing something she hadn’t quite planned to. “I’m not even sure why she was asked to do the PR relationship in the first place. She isn’t even that pretty.”
I set my phone down on the bed. Why was I watching this?
“I will be going live at five p.m. to answer all your questions,” Lucy said brightly, snapping back into influencer register like a rubber band.
“Make sure to like and follow. And for those wondering: the top is Free People, the lip gloss is Dior, and as always”—she touched her hair—"this is my real hair.”
This woman.
I scrolled to the comments because, apparently, I had learned nothing, having already been the subject of one viral video.
Whoever she is, she doesn’t hold a candle.
Ahh, he’s a fool to pick anyone but you.
You deserve so much better, Queen.
She probably knew exactly what she was doing the whole time.
I locked the phone, and it buzzed immediately.
Rowan:
Are you alive?
I looked at it.
I thought about the omissions. About the shop sitting in my inbox, approved and real and still unshared. About how I had walked into that hotel room and let someone see me completely—no deflection, no distance, nothing in front of it—and then run the second something cracked the surface.
I was doing it everywhere. Not just with Ethan. With Rowan. With all of it.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand.
The shop was mine. The bank had confirmed it. I had to get through a debrief this afternoon with Ethan, the man I had left standing in a hotel room practically naked.
I got up and opened my closet.
What does one wear to end a PR relationship? What does one wear to return a stolen jacket? What does one wear to a meeting when both of those things are happening at the same time?
In my closet was an old T-shirt Rowan had bought at a thrift store that read "October is for lovers." Too much? Yeah. Way too much.
I reached for the first thing. Too casual. The second—too night club. The third, I hadn’t worn since probably the fourth grade. The fourth was a blazer I bought for the job interview at the shop a million years ago. The fifth felt like trying too hard. The sixth felt like not trying hard enough.
I kept going.
Farther into the back of the closet, past the things I wore regularly, past the things I wore occasionally, into the territory of things I had kept for reasons I could no longer fully explain.
My hand closed around something, and I pulled it out. A white sheet with two eye holes cut in it.
Last year’s Halloween costume. I’d gone as a ghost because I had decided to be ironic about the whole thing. Rowan had said it was chic, and I had believed her because I always believed her. In retrospect, the eye holes had not been level, which was its own problem.
A ghost would be appropriate today. Haunt the debrief. Drift through the room. Nobody could prove it was me under there. Although, given the last twelve hours, showing up as a clown would be more accurate.
I put the sheet back.
Dark jeans. A fitted top. My good boots. Something that said, ‘I am a person who makes reasonable decisions, ’ even though the evidence suggested otherwise.
I showered, which helped a little, and I pulled myself together in the bathroom mirror with the grim efficiency of someone defusing a bomb.
Concealer applied with the focused desperation of a woman who needed to look like she had slept, even though she’d barely done so.
By the time I was done, I looked sixty percent like a person with her life together, which was going to have to be enough.
I grabbed my keys.
His jacket was on the floor by the chair.
I could bring it. Return it at the debrief. Hand it to him and say something normal, like ‘I accidentally took this.’ He would say something normal back, and it would be fine.
Except it wouldn’t be fine. I would have to stand there and look at him, and I would be stupid about it—I already knew I would be stupid about it—and all of it would be right there on my face, and the last thing I needed was to walk into that room already undone before it had even started.
I left the jacket on the floor.
Meeting first.
The shop, Rowan, and the jacket, and all of it—problems for a version of me who had already survived the meeting.