That would have been the official end of my rope. If he was on the flight laughing like that, it would mean she was, too. No one wanted to see that conversation.
There was the anger.
But right on its heels came the sting of tears in the backs of my eyes as a fresh wave of sadness and embarrassment washed over me. I combed my fingers back through my hair, not for the first time noticing it actually felt different to do that without the ring on my hand. The ring Steven had the audacity to ask for before I left.
And there was the anger again.
By the time we got to elevation, I’d gone through another cycle of emotions, but at least my hands weren’t clenched into tight fists. The plane finally started circling the airport outside of Astoria, and I gathered up everything around me. In addition to being a nervous flyer, I was a messy flyer.
I had everything collected and was back in my seat belt in time for the descent. Finally, we touched down, and I let out a sigh. I was back in Astoria. My childhood home and a place I never saw myself moving back to once I left for college.
And yet, here I was, walking out of the plane into the little airport with that disoriented feeling coming back. I had been in this airport before, of course. But I still felt like I was out of touch and couldn’t quite decipher where I was or what I was supposed to be doing.
Maybe that was because I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in an airport, just not this one. It made me feel like I had managed to get on the wrong flight somehow and ended up in Oregon rather than the Bahamas.
Of course, if I was in the Bahamas, I wouldn’t be tossing my carry-on over my shoulder and walking by myself to the luggage claim. I would have Steven beside me and a wedding ring on my hand. It seemed like such a good idea when we were engaged to delay our honeymoon. We wanted to take some time after the wedding to settle down and really enjoy being freshly married, then head out on our dream trip at the perfect time. To the perfect island and to the perfect hotel.
Three weeks after the wedding I ended up attending solo, I wasn’t landing on a picturesque island for my dream vacation. I was dragging myself home to lick my wounds and figure out how I was going to start over.
As I approached baggage claim, a familiar face looked back at me from the crowd, and I felt the tension and stress drain out of my body. My brother, Nick, was waiting by the luggage carousel for me, my bags already at his feet. He opened his arms to me as I walked up and pulled me into a warm embrace.
“Thank you for coming to pick me up,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let you get a taxi to bring you home.”
He reached down and picked up my luggage. I looked at it, then back at him.
“How did you know those were my bags?” I asked.
“You didn’t exactly make it difficult to identify,” he said. “The colors gave you away.”
Each of my suitcases had several brightly colored ribbons and a garish luggage tag so it was easy to identify them when they were swirling around the carousel. We left the airport, and I followed him through the parking lot to his car. He waited until we had pulled out and we were on our way to look at me with concern in his eyes.
“How are you doing?” he asked. “Seriously. Just you and me talking.”
“I’m okay. Honestly, that’s about the most I can say. It’s getting easier every day, but it’s still a lot. Like there are times when I can’t figure out exactly how I’m supposed to feel about it all. Or like I think it didn’t actually happen and anytime now I’m going to wake up. That always sounded so stupid when I heard it on a TV show or a movie. But now I can absolutely understand why people say it.”
“Have you had much contact with Steven?”
“Not a ton. I’ve kind of been doing my best to avoid him as much as possible. But I have definitely heard a lot about him. Apparently, I’m the only one in town who didn’t know he was cheating on me and lying to my face every time we spoke,” I said. “Now all of a sudden people are coming out of the woodwork to let me know all of these awful things he did.”
“Helluva lot of good it’s going to do to you now,” Nick said.