That’s me, now. Ripped open. Bleeding. Unsalvageable.
And then there’s Ethan. Beautiful, brilliant, duplicitous Ethan. My obsession. My addiction. Until this moment, my everything.
But not anymore. Not now. Not ever again.
The knowledge grounds me, helps keep the pain at bay. At least until my phone starts buzzing, letting me know I have a text. I don’t need to look at the screen to know it’s from Ethan. Just like the one that comes in next. And the one after that. And the one after that.
Suddenly I can’t handle it. Can’t stand this connection between us, no matter how tenuous, for one second more. I yank my phone out of my back pocket, carry it over to the garbage disposal. Drop it in. And then turn the thing on.
Like everything else in this kitchen, the garbage disposal is heavy duty, industrial grade. Though it makes a terrible noise, it only takes seconds for it to break my phone to pieces. To break it down to its most basic, rudimentary form.
Like me. Always like me.
I pause at the thought, at the knowledge that every broken thing has something in common with another broken thing. Here, now, I am that broken thing, the pieces of me as ill-equipped to deal with my environment as the remnants of my phone now are to deal with theirs.
Ethan’s mom watches the drama and its aftermath with raised brows and pursed lips and a hint of glee in the depth of her eyes. Just a hint. It’s enough to make me stop, enough to make me stand perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen and pretend for a moment that my world hasn’t come crashing down around my ears.
She waits it out, trying to decide—I think—what crazy stunt I’m going to pull next. When I give her nothing, when I hold myself together with a very short shoestring and an even shorter prayer, she shrugs, seems to give up. And then she’s shaking her head, walking out of the kitchen. “Stupid, ignorant, pathetic girl,” she says as she heads down the hall. “You never even stood a chance.”
I should probably be offended, but I’m not. Because she’s right. I didn’t. The odds were stacked against me from the very beginning and I never even had a clue. I almost leave. I almost pack my one, measly pathetic bag and walk out of Ethan’s house, and his life, forever. I could do it. I should do it. There’s enough cash on Ethan’s dresser to pay for a cab to the airport. And if I feel icky about taking that—which I tell myself I don’t, but it’s just another lie—there’s always Rodrigo and Lucia. If I ask them for a ride, I’m positive they’ll take me.
I almost do it. I plan on doing it. I walk out of the house and even make it halfway down the hill to the wine-making barns where Rodrigo normally works, when I can’t go any farther.
I’m stuck, filled with a crippling sense of sadness and an even more crippling sense of what could have been. What should have been if this was a different life, if I was a different person, if Ethan … if Ethan wasn’t such a goddamn fucking liar.
It kills me that I can’t leave. Kills me that I still care, that I can’t treat him as callously as he’s treated me over and over and over again.
Oh, I know there’s a lot of good in him. Just like I know he’s treated me right in almost every way a man can treat a woman. But the ways that he’s treated me wrong—the ways he’s been wrong—they’re just too big. Just too much. I can’t live like this, knowing what he’s done. And I sure as hell can’t stick around and wait for the other shoe to drop. I already feel like a whole store filled with steel-toed boots has fallen on me. I’m not waiting around to see what else falls down. I may be stupid and naive, but nobody ever said I was a masochist.
And yet, here I sit on the family room couch watching the second hand spin the clock around. Watching the minute hand creep farther and farther around the face of the clock, until it, too, spins itself around. There’s a startling feeling of déjà vu, of having done this before.
Because I have. Less than a week ago. I waited and watched, watched and waited, as Ethan wined and dined clients of some sort. Today, I’m doing the same thing—only this time, there’s no hope left inside me. No fear that things won’t turn out all right. Because I already know they won’t, already know it’s over. I just need to give Ethan the courtesy of saying so face-to-face.
Finally, after what feels like days but is really a little less than two hours, the front door opens and shuts. “Chloe!” It’s Ethan, back from wherever he was. Ethan, calling my name like a crazy man as he comes charging through the house. “Chloe!”
Again, déjà vu.
“I’m right here,” I tell him from my spot in the shadows.
“Thank God. When you didn’t answer the texts I sent you and then didn’t pick up the phone, I thought something had happened to you.”
Oh, something happened to me all right. But I’m not ready to share it with him yet. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll ever be ready or if I’ll just tell him off and then walk away without ever letting him know that I know.
Except, it turns out, I don’t have that kind of restraint. The first words out of my mouth are, “Your mother stopped by.”
“My mother?” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “My mother lives in Boston.”
“Be that as it may, she was here about two hours ago.”
“Was here? As in not here now? She left without seeing me?”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure she did what she came to do.”
I can see the moment he figures it out, the moment he realizes just what went down here when he was out doing God knows what.
“Chloe.”
I can’t even look at him. All those minutes wasted waiting for him, planning what I was going to say and how I was going to say it, and I can’t even look at him. Can’t even open my mouth.