Chapter 14 Disappear
Summer
I drive fourteen hours. The only stops are gas, coffee, and one twenty-minute nap at a rest stop in Kentucky where I wake up disoriented and crying and sit in the driver's seat for ten minutes remembering where I am and what I just did.
I reach Chicago and pull off at the first exit and sit there with the engine off.
Wicker Park. The name sounds like a place no Bennet would think to look for me.
A third-floor walk-up. The photos show hardwood floors, a bed, and good light.
I book it for a month. The code comes through before I've put the phone down.
The walk-up is three flights up. Keypad code.
The door opens. Small. Clean. Hardwood floors.
A kitchen the size of a closet. A bed that's too soft and smells like someone else's laundry detergent.
The furniture is beige and impersonal and has no opinions about me.
I set my suitcase down. Stand in the middle of the living room.
A week ago I was in a green sweater in my own kitchen writing.
Now I am here. I have two suitcases. I have my laptop.
I have a hard drive with every manuscript I have ever written.
I have eight photos saved on my phone and three sentences on a torn page of yellow legal pad sitting on a dresser south of here.
I have a city that doesn't know me. That is why.
Chicago. Big. Cold. Indifferent. Indifference is the kindest thing anyone can offer me right now.
The silence is different here. In Charleston, silence was the absence of something that should have been there. Colt's voice. His keys in the ceramic dish. The smell of his coffee in the morning. The silence in Charleston was full of him, even when he wasn't in the room.
This silence is blank. It doesn't know my name. It doesn't know that a few nights ago I watched my marriage end on a phone screen.
I sit on the floor. Back against the wall.
I cry.
I can finally let go. There is no one I need to manage the expectations of, or hold it together for.
I am alone in this space, and I cry. Not the pretty kind.
I cry until my ribs hurt. Until my eyes swell shut.
Until the sound coming out of me doesn't sound like me anymore.
Sounds like an animal deciding whether to die or fight.
I fight.
I don't know when the crying stops. An hour. Two. Eventually my body just quits. The grief isn't finished. I am.
I lie on the floor, stare at the ceiling and breathe.
I am alive. I am in Chicago. I am alone.
For the first time in eight years, no one is expecting me to be anywhere or be anything or perform any version of myself for anyone.
The freedom is so big it almost breaks me again.
***
Two weeks.
I build a routine. One thing, then the next thing. It is how I get through each moment.
I learn to start the days with coffee and the cursor. I have a manuscript due. The work doesn't care about catastrophe. The page is blank and the story needs telling regardless of whether the person telling it is whole.
I write. And it's good. The anger that's been living in my chest since that night pours onto the page like accelerant.
Every scene catches fire. My heroine is sharper.
My villain is more insidious. The betrayal at the center of the plot feels real in a way my previous books didn't, because I'm not imagining anymore.
I know what it tastes like. I know how it feels.
I know what it is like to have someone make me feel like I'm crazy for seeing something that only exists in my gut. My gut wasn't wrong.
I walk in the afternoons. Chicago is a city built for walking.
The lake and the riverfront. The neighborhoods.
The architecture changing every few blocks like the city is trying on personalities.
I walk until my legs ache and my brain goes quiet.
I spend a lot of time just sitting at Buckingham fountain.
I don't call Colt. He's tried. Calls, texts, emails. Blocked. All of it. His voice is a weapon and I am not armored enough.
I text my parents every day. I'm safe. I love you. Daddy texts back: Love you, baby girl. Mama calls twice a week and we talk about new recipes and weather and the diner. We don't talk about Colt.
Jake sends memes. A pelican so ugly it looks personally offended. Caption: this is how you described Colt at prom and I never forgot. I laugh for the first time in two weeks and it hurts my face.
Autumn calls every night. She talks. I listen.
She keeps me distracted. She talks about her job, her dating life.
A pigeon on her fire escape. She doesn't ask me questions.
She fills the silence with her voice because the alternative is letting me sit in it alone, and Autumn Hayes has never allowed that.
She wants to come see me, she begs me to let her blow in like the hurricane that she is and carry me through this. I ask her to give me more time.
***
Three weeks pass before something in the city catches me. An evening at blue hour, I'm walking down Milwaukee Avenue when the city shifts from day to night, and I see the sign.
Art deco lettering. Warm gold backlight.
VIBES.
Below it, smaller: Burlesque. Cabaret. The Art of Being Seen.
The Art of Being Seen.
I stop. People flow around me. Chicago doesn't slow down for a woman working something out. But I stand there and something happens in my chest that I haven't felt in weeks. Not happiness. Not hope. Something quieter. Recognition. The sign is speaking a language I forgot I knew.
I go in.
It's beautiful. Intimate. Maybe two hundred seats arranged in a half-moon around a stage draped in velvet.
Low light. Exposed brick. A bar along the back wall staffed by a man with dark hair and a black t-shirt.
Every inch of him that shows is covered in ink.
He polishes the glasses with the unhurried precision of someone who's done this ten thousand times and still gives a shit.
The show starts.
The first performer takes the stage and I forget to be devastated.
She's tall. Dark-skinned. Corset, thigh-highs and an expression that could melt rebar.
She moves with a power that isn't only about sex.
It's about ownership. She owns every inch of her body, every roll of her hips, every arch of her spine.
She is performing for herself and we are privileged to witness it.
I watch her and something old in me wakes up. The memory of what it felt like to exist in my own skin without apology, before the Bennets, before the galas, before I learned to shrink.
The show goes on. More performers. All body types. All energies. A man does a routine with a chair that's so charged the woman next to me fans herself and says, "Lord have mercy." I'm smiling.
After the show. The room empties. I don't move.
The man from the bar comes over. Late twenties.
Tall. Hair that is messy in that I'm not trying way that takes work to do.
Sexy as hell. A face that gets more interesting the longer you look at it.
Brown eyes. Tired and kind. Tattoos run from his hands all the way up his arms, and I can see some of them peeking out the collar of his shirt.
Good night. This man is sex personified.
"You look like you need to not think for a while."
"Is it that obvious?"
"I own a bar inside a burlesque club. I can read a room." He sets a bourbon in front of me. Neat. Unbidden. "On the house."
"You don't have to."
"I know." He picks up my empty glass. "I'm Sam."
"Summer."
He doesn't ask my last name. Doesn't ask why I'm alone. Doesn't ask anything. Nods. Like Summer is all the information he needs.
I stay until last call. I don't talk to anyone. I sit in the dim light of this room and I breathe, and the breathing comes easy for the first time in three weeks.
I come back the next night.
And the next.
And the next.