Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
His expression didn’t waver. His hands stayed at his sides.
“I see you, Julian.” Without flinching. “I’ve seen you from the first second. And I know you see me too. I know it because your voice breaks when you say my name and you learned the crack in my Tupperware lid before I ever told you a single thing about myself. But you’ve made your choice. So I’ll make mine.”
She put down the cloth. Straightened her polo. Smoothed one hand over her hair, the red hair that had been catching the three-fifteen light for him a hundred times, and she turned and she walked.
Across the terrace. Past Table Five. Past Table Twelve. Past the bar where Maui stood frozen with wide eyes and a dropped fork still on the ground. Through the service door, into the back hallway where the fluorescent buzzed overhead and the walls were beige and the air smelled like kitchen grease and the world was ugly and small and not the jacaranda-shadowed paradise she’d been living in for the past month.
The locker room was empty. She sat down on the bench where the staff kept their bags and put her hands in her lap and studied them.
Both of them were trembling. A fine, violent tremor that she observed with the detached fascination of a girl who’d spent her whole life keeping herself together and had just discovered the exact weight it took to pull her apart.
She flattened her palms against her thighs. Kept them there. Counted to ten. Her eyes burned, but the tears wouldn’t come. They were stuck somewhere behind her ribs, lodged in the hollow space he’d scooped out with his nothing expression and his rehearsed speech and the word fixation, and they sat there, heavy and hot and permanent, but they wouldn’t rise.
Seven minutes on the bench. Then she stood up, retrieved her bag from the locker, changed out of the polyester polo she would never wear again, and walked out the back door of Haven Country Club for the last time.
No resignation letter. No goodbye to Maui or Speedy or the kitchen staff who’d saved her a bread roll on her first day. She walked to her car in the staff lot and sat behind the wheel and put her key in the ignition and thought about driving home and eating dinner with Amy and going to bed and waking up tomorrow in a world where Julian Ventura had called her love a fixation to her face.
Her hand wouldn’t cooperate with the key. She tried again. The engine caught.
She drove home on muscle memory, signaling turns and braking at lights and doing all the mechanical things a body does when the person inside it has gone somewhere very far away.
Amy was in the kitchen when she walked in. Textbooks on the table, paralegal coursework spread across the place mats, a pen behind her ear. Her mother smiled and said “Hey, baby, how was work?” and Katy said “Fine” and went to her room and closed the door and lay on her bed and let the ceiling blur above her.
She didn’t cry that night. Or the next morning, or the morning after that. The tears stayed where they were, heavy and unmovable. He’d broken something so fundamental that even her grief couldn’t find the exit.
On the third day, Amy knocked on her door.
“Kates?” Gentle. The voice of a woman who’d learned to read the silences in her daughter as Katy had once read the silences in her. “You quit Haven?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
A pause. “You don’t have to be okay.”
“I know.” She pulled the pillow tighter against her chest. “I will be, though.”
Amy didn’t push. She’d learned that, too, in recovery. That sometimes the people you loved needed you to stand outside the door and let them know it was unlocked. “I love you, baby.”
“Love you too.”
She heard her mother’s footsteps fade down the hallway, and then the apartment was quiet.
On the fourth day, Katy bought a dress.
PROM WAS ON A SATURDAY. She drove herself to Luke Dryer High School at six forty-five in the evening, parked in the student lot between a minivan with a PROUD SENIOR PARENT bumper sticker and a pickup truck that belonged to someone on the football team, and sat in her car for four minutes facing the gymnasium doors.
The dress was green. Twelve dollars from a thrift store on Vermont, cotton, a full skirt that hit below her knees. It wasn’t a prom dress. Prom dresses were satin and sequins and cost more than her car payment. This was a dress for a girl who wanted to show up anyway. A girl who was going to walk into that gymnasium alone and stand under the rented disco balls and drink punch from a plastic cup and prove to herself that she could still enter a room without him in it.