3. Chapter 3
Chapter three
Savannah
Ifinally have to stop for gas outside the city.
As I pull up to the pump, I remember the suitcase.
The trunk isn't empty. This was the car for the drive to the airport tomorrow morning.
Preston and I and two suitcases packed for ten days of honeymooning. Half the trip was supposed to be a safari in South Africa—game drives, hiking, and enough outdoor excursions to justify half my suitcase being actual Blake Co. clothing and gear.
The second half was the Seychelles, a beach resort and the kind of warm you don't think about twice. I packed it last night before bed, half-checking off a list Liv made me, because that's the kind of bride I was.
I pull off at the next exit that has a gas station sign tall enough to see from the highway.
The dress comes off in a single-stall bathroom that smells like pine cleaner, veil balled up and stuffed in my bag because I can't make myself throw it in the trash can, not yet, not with strangers walking in and out of the next room.
I dig through the suitcase without really looking, past the linen and the sandals, until my hand lands on something with more structure to it — a technical jacket, moisture-wicking leggings, trail runners still creased from the box.
I catch myself in the water-spotted mirror.
My hair is still half pinned from the stylist, and mascara is running down my cheeks.
I’m now dressed like I'm about to summit a mountain, instead of driving thirteen more hours to Tennessee. The sound that comes out of me isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite a sob.
I packed this outfit for the trip I was supposed to take after getting married. Instead, I'm wearing it to run away from the wedding.
I buy a coffee I don't drink and a hair tie I do use, and I get back on the road.
The drive is long enough to think, which is either the best thing about it or the worst, depending on the mile marker.
Somewhere around Pennsylvania I'm crying so hard again I have to pull onto the shoulder for ten minutes, hazards on, both hands over my face.
A trucker slows down to check if I need help before I wave him on.
Eventually, I stop crying entirely and just drive, radio off, nothing but tires on asphalt and my own thoughts running in circles I can't seem to break.
Somewhere on the drive south, Stonebridge stopped being a thought and became my destination.
There wasn't a pros-and-cons list. No hotel reservation. No plan waiting for me when I got there.
Maybe some part of me knew I needed to go back to the last place where I remember being completely, uncomplicatedly myself.
I don't call anyone. I don't turn my phone back on until I'm crossing into Tennessee, and even then I only peek at it long enough to see the number of missed calls.
I count to eleven, then stop before I turn it back over on the seat.
By the time Stonebridge's water tower comes into view, painted the same faded blue it's been my whole life, I've been driving for thirteen hours and I couldn't tell you what exit I took to get here. My body just knew the way.
Texie's porch light is already on when I pull into the gravel drive, even though it's barely past dusk, like she's been waiting for headlights that might be mine.
Somewhere along the drive, I stopped crying long enough to call her.
We haven't kept in touch the way we always swore we would. Birthdays. Christmas texts. The occasional phone call that lasts an hour and ends with both of us promising we won't wait so long next time.
But Texie is still Texie. The kind of friend I can call after fifteen years away and say, I need somewhere to go, and know I can land on her porch without having to explain everything first.
She didn’t ask questions.
“Come,” she says. “I'll be home.”
She comes down the steps in socked feet before I've even opened the car door, takes one look at me through the windshield, and doesn't ask a single question.
She just opens my door, pulls me out by both hands, and wraps me up so tight I lose my breath for a second.
“Okay,” she says into my hair. “Okay. You're here.”
“I'm here.”
Saying it out loud starts me crying all over again.
Texie doesn't let go. She just holds on while I get it under control, which takes about thirty seconds and several very unattractive breaths.
I finally pull back and wipe under my eyes.
“Sorry.”
“Don't be.” She keeps both hands on my arms.
“You want to talk, or you want muffins first?”
A laugh slips out between the last of the tears. “Muffins first.”
“Smart girl.” She holds me back at arm's length, taking in the leggings, trail runners, Blake Co. jacket, and general disaster of my hair.
“Also, and I say this with love—you seem to have escaped a wedding and immediately signed up to climb Everest.”
I wave a hand at my outfit. “It's honeymoon clothes.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Your honeymoon involved Everest?”
“A safari.”
“Of course. Every honeymoon should include a safari.” She shakes her head.
“Nothing says romance like getting up at five a.m. to search for lions.”
“There was a beach afterward.”
“Let me guess. The safari was Preston's idea.”
“Don't. If you're nice to me right now I'm going to fall apart on your driveway.”
“I wasn't being nice.”
That gets another laugh out of me.
“Fair.” She loops her arm through mine instead and walks me up the porch steps like this is just an ordinary day.
Like friends she hasn’t seen in years show up unannounced at dusk in vacation clothes all the time.
“Boys are already asleep. You're in their room tonight. Luke's bunk, since Ben kicks.”
“I don't want to put anyone out.”
“You're not putting anyone out. You're putting yourself in a bed with a Star Wars comforter and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, and you're going to sleep, and tomorrow we'll figure out the rest.”
She squeezes my arm once, hard. “Tonight, nobody's asking you anything.”
I could cry again, easily, but I don't.
I just nod, and let her lead me down the hall past a wall of school pictures and one crooked family portrait from a beach trip years ago, into a room that smells like clean laundry and somebody's sneakers.
The stars on the ceiling are the peel-and-stick kind, half of them faded to nothing. I lie down under the Darth Vader comforter fully dressed and I'm asleep before I even think to take off my trail runners.
I sleep until almost noon, which hasn't happened since college, and wake up disoriented, staring at plastic stars, trying to remember for one merciful second why none of this is my apartment.
Then I remember all of it at once.
My phone's been charging on the nightstand. Probably Texie's doing, since I don't remember plugging it in.
When I turn it over there are forty-three texts and eight missed calls from Liv.
I call her back before I've even sat up.
“Savannah.” Liv's voice comes through so fast it's almost one word.
“You're alive. Where have you been?”
I've called you at least twenty times. I've texted. I've emailed. I was about ten minutes away from calling the police.”
“I'm in Tennessee.”
Silence for a second.
“Tennessee?”
“Stonebridge.”
Another beat.
“Okay. I have several questions.”
“I'm okay. I'm at Texie's. I slept for like fourteen hours.”
“You slept.” She says it like the word doesn't compute.
“Savannah, you disappeared from your own wedding. There is a photo of you running down the street in a wedding dress that has, and I want to be precise here, three hundred thousand views.”
I sit all the way up.
“There's a photo?”
“There's several photos. There's a very unflattering one from behind where your veil seems to be trying to escape independently of you. I've seen it captioned dozens of different ways. My personal favorite calls you 'Cinderella, but she's the one who left at midnight on purpose.'
Despite everything, I laugh—a real one this time, surprising even myself.
“That's actually pretty good.”
“It's very good. I hate that it's good.”
I hear her exhale, the kind she does when she's about to shift from panic to business, the way she has for almost ten years whenever something at Blake Co. goes sideways.
“Okay. Talk to me. What's the damage. What do we need to manage.”
“Manage how?”
“Press-wise. PR-wise. I already told the office you're dealing with a family emergency, which, depending on how you look at it, isn't even a lie.”
A pause.
“Preston's people called this morning.”
My stomach tightens.
“What'd they say?”
“Just checking if you're safe. Which, credit where it's due, that's a decent thing to lead with.”
Another pause, gentler this time.
“He's not calling you a villain to anybody, Savannah. If anything, half the internet's mad at his mother, not you.”
That is the detail that gets me — the idea of Mrs. Harrington trending on the internet and I don't know whether to feel guilty about that or grateful.
“It'll blow over,” Liv says, softer now.
“It always does. Some other disaster will happen by Thursday and nobody will remember your dress by Friday. I promise you.”
“That's very comforting, Liv.”
“Seriously. How are you? Actually.”
I take in everything around me—Luke's trophies on the shelf, the crooked stars, a Jedi poster taped up crooked over the desk—and try to find an honest answer.
“I don't know yet,” I say.
“But I slept better last night than I have in weeks. That has to mean something.”
“It means something,” Liv agrees.
“Take the week. Take two. We've got the office. We've got you.”
I hear Texie banging around in the kitchen down the hall, humming something off-key, and somewhere outside a screen door slaps shut and one of the boys yells about a soccer ball.
“Two weeks,” I tell her, and for the first time since yesterday afternoon, the words don't feel like a lie I'm telling to keep the peace.
They feel like the truth.