Chapter 42
Aubrey
Monday Afternoon
Four Days After the Outing
Aubrey’s wedge sandals catch in the gaps between the bricks as she spins. The rehab center, the AIM logo, Ethan’s building,
the deli with the rooibos lattes. The rehab center, the AIM logo, Ethan’s building, the deli with the rooibos lattes, again
and again, around and around, all blurring into one giant string of malware replicating inside Aubrey until she explodes.
Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. She stops spinning, bends at the waist, places her hands on her thighs, her knees, her face that’s not even damp with tears.
Her heart’s pumping too hard just to keep her alive, it has no room for tears. Grayson’s dead, and everyone will know it once
the footage goes live on The Shandy Shane Show.
Mallory, gone, Ilena, gone, she was the only one left when Ella and Kai and Noreen and the rest of AIM all looked to her to explain, to make sense of the police officers and Grayson and what this means for going public, for AIM’s future, for their future.
A thousand questions to which she had no answer: Mallory’s father and the police asking where Mallory was, and why Ilena never came, and why a television crew was filming in the office—filming them—and everything’s changed, all of it changed, and Aubrey’s jaw locked.
Her tongue went limp. Her brain was the only thing going, but not working, swirling, unable to focus, to make a single decision on anything, for any of them.
She’d still be there, hands twisting and eyes wide, if it hadn’t been for Felix. He handled everything, or she thinks he did,
hopes? She left. Let Noreen carefully guide her to the restroom, her words of reassurance about not giving up hope and how
friends stick together and everything will work out okay just white noise. And when Noreen went to check on the dog, Aubrey
snuck out. Elevator, lobby, plaza, looking for Mallory or Ilena or the life she had or could have or—
“Aubrey?”
The familiar voice curdles her stomach.
“Aubrey? I thought that was you. I was just about to text you.”
Ethan stands before her, his eyes like a snake’s behind those black-rimmed glasses. Maybe it’s the light. Or maybe it’s because
Aubrey’s no longer in the dark.
“Leave,” she mutters under her breath.
“My thoughts exactly. Your place? I’ve got about—” he holds up his phone “—twenty minutes? Good, right?”
Aubrey fully straightens, a pounding in her temples, a constriction in her throat.
The bed, the curtain, the white sheet. Ethan.
“No,” she says.
His eyes flash with annoyance. “My office, then. Shades, ergonomic desk chair, we can make it work. Even got a change of clothes
for this exact reason.”
Because she’s surely not the first woman he’s cheated on his fiancée with. She clasps her eyes shut like a child, but she’s not a child and she needs to stop acting like one. “I’m so stupid sometimes. Maybe all the time.”
“You aren’t making any sense.” He presses his hand on her lower back. “Babe, last night, your friends, I nailed it. Honestly—”
“Don’t! Don’t use that word. There’s nothing honest about you in any world, is there? I may be naive and needy, yes, sure,
I am, but I also trust, and I trusted you, and you used that to get . . . what exactly? What did you want from me? Why me?”
His eyes dart around the plaza. “Let’s maybe go somewhere else—”
She wrestles away from him. “To your fiancée’s, perhaps?” The word burns like acid.
“My what?” He shakes his head. “Listen, I can explain whatever you think’s going on, but not here, let’s . . .” He looks past
her, a strange expression overtaking his face, before stepping closer, crowding her, and for a moment, she thinks she was
wrong. She misinterpreted, and then his hands are on her cheeks, cool against her flush, and the life she had—they had—rushes
back and fills her with one desire: to not relive it.
Clove nearly suffocates her, and his lips press against hers. She can’t move. He again lands a hand on her lower back, edging
down, and she breaks away.
“Last night wasn’t enough for you. I get that a lot.” He’s grinning, strangely, jutting his chin. “Hey, kid.”
“It’s Kai.”
Aubrey turns. It is Kai, holding a leash. Harley bounces upon seeing Aubrey. Kai, pointedly, does not.
“It’s not what you think,” she says to Kai.
“Oh, but it is,” Ethan says with a wink. “Not just once, twice. With a third to come. Pun intended.”
Aubrey whirls around to face him. “You don’t know me, you never really did know me. But if you did, you’d understand how much
it means for me to say ‘Fuck you.’”
His lips thin, then he shrugs. “Whatever, crazy bitch.”
“Aubrey,” Kai says calmly despite the tightness of his jaw. “Do you want to go?”
She nods.
“Do you want me to walk with you?”
She nods again. “If you don’t mind.”
“No hard feelings, then?” Ethan says, but she keeps her back to him, eyes straight ahead on the logo for AIM beside the front
door of the building.
When they reach it, Kai picks up Harley. “Here. Noreen asked me to get him to Mallory before Mr. Fields’s secretary took him.”
Aubrey accepts the dog despite the scratchiness building in her throat. “I’ll get him to her.”
Kai places his hands in his front pockets, exhaling, like he’d been punched in the gut. He turns and heads for the entrance.
“Wait!” Aubrey says. “I can explain everything. Well, maybe not everything. There’s a lot I don’t know how to explain, but
most of that isn’t important. But what is important, well, I still can’t explain that, actually, when it comes down to it.
Because how do you explain things you don’t know but simply feel? Which is this: I like you.”
“I liked you too.”
She breathes a sigh of relief. “Great, then great, so—”
“I just don’t think I can trust you.”
He enters the building, and she can’t blame him. She huddles Harley to her chest, the orange fur a surrogate for her grandmother’s
afghan, and she’s back to the day her teenage self curled beneath it, having lost her virginity to a boy she realized too
late didn’t deserve it or her, knowing she’d never trust herself again. Except, maybe “never” doesn’t exist across universes.
What she feels right now about Kai, she trusts it implicitly.