Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 25827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 25827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
So why then?
Why is this wedding night not just about him and me, but him and me...and her?
I don’t understand.
I don’t understand.
Somebody, please help me understand.
I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to make some kind of noise that will either wake them up or wake myself up so I can tell myself this is all just a dream.
A very, very bad dream.
I want to run away, but I also want to run into the room and just fall to my knees and beg.
Why did you make me fall in love with you if you were going to kill me like this?
Why fly me all the way to Italy to destroy me?
Why isn’t it enough for him to break my heart on a Tuesday, break it again in a basement parking lot, and now he just has to ruin Lake Como for me, too?
The words running through my mind make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.
But for now, I’m just...numb.
I keep thinking I should move, but it’s as if shock has turned my flesh into stone. I keep thinking any moment now I’ll start crying, and maybe I can even start screaming—I’ll scream this whole place down so that the hotel employees will come running, and we can have this huge, over-the-top fight, and this whole thing will go viral, and everyone will know they cheated on me.
Maybe then I can start crying.
Maybe then I’ll actually start hurting.
Because right now...the tears just won’t come.
I can’t feel anything. I can’t even hear anything. And it’s this stark, heartless silence that will give me nightmares for months. I keep touching my eyes, but they’re just absolutely, terribly dry.
It’s as if they’re telling me that this pain, this betrayal...
Is something I’ll just have to live with forever.
Chapter One
MONDAYS IN THE SUMMER are made of two sounds.
The first is Mr. Diaz downstairs, banging on his radiator at six-fifteen the way he's banged on his radiator every morning since I moved into this building, even though it's June and there's nothing in that radiator to bang at. He told me once it was the principle of the thing. The radiator had given him grief in February, and he'd decided, as a man, that he wasn't going to forget.
The second is the bus letting out its long pneumatic sigh at the stop on the corner, like even the bus is exhausted by the start of a new week.
Mondays in the summer are also—
Nope.
My mind almost had me there.
It's been eighteen years, but my mind just refuses to forget about the worst Monday of my life. I don't even know why that is when my own husband of nine hours forgot he was supposed to spend his wedding night with his bride, and not his...not-bride.
That's all I know of her. She wasn't me.
And that's enough.
I make my coffee. I rinse my cup. I lock my door behind me, two turns of the key the way I've locked it every morning of my careful little life, and head down the four flights to the street. No elevator in this building, but I look at it as my daily workout, so it's fine.
The L's thirty-five minutes if I make my connection and forty-five if I don't, and either way Mr. Bell will be there before I am because Mr. Bell's been the bailiff in Judge Iverson's courtroom since I was in middle school.
The courthouse on a Monday morning has its own specific flavor of madness. Lawyers with three coffees and one shoelace untied. Defendants who've cried in the bathroom and are pretending they haven't. Family members holding bouquets they shouldn't have brought. I weave through it the way I've weaved through it for twelve years, and even though I've been working here for twelve years, I can still count on one hand the number of people I know by name.
I'm not shy or anything. I'm just...not good with crowds.
They eat up my social battery pretty fast, which is why my best friend Odessa still can't understand why I chose this.
You live in your head, June, she's said to me approximately a hundred times. Why do you also work in a room full of strangers?
To which I've always said: because in this room, I'm the one whose words become the record.
She has yet to find that satisfying, but Odessa lives in Lisbon now, so her opinions arrive on a five-hour delay, and I've learned to outrun them.
"Morning, June." Mr. Bell's already at the bench, polishing the gavel block with the soft cloth he keeps in his breast pocket—a small ritual nobody's ever asked him to perform, which is why he performs it.
"Morning, Mr. Bell."
I set my stenotype case down and start unspooling the cables, the way I've unspooled them every Monday for twelve years. The machine hums to life under my fingers. The transcript file opens. I am, in this small kingdom, exactly where I belong.